Macs in a school

[lpratt]

Hi Everyone,

 

We're looking to redo our macs in a school environment. I'm looking for some suggestions on the current best practices for setting up macs in this environment in terms of users being able to log in using their AD accounts, and being able to save their data to a central location so it can be backed up.

 

If anyone has any advice on this, that would be appreciated.

 

Thanks

[dhicks]

I'm looking for some suggestions on the current best practices for setting up macs in this environment in terms of users being able to log in using their AD accounts, and being able to save their data to a central location so it can be backed up.

 

MacOS should be able to join a Windows domain and access shared folders just fine. We manage ours with Jamf, which handles the domain join for you and allows you to control various settings for a bunch of machines at once, much like Active Directory does for Windows. I'm pretty sure someone's mentioned now being able to log on to a Mac via a GSuite account, but I can't remember / find any details.

[lpratt]

Does sharing the folders allow students to have access to their individual file paths?

[3s-gtech]

MacOS will pull the home folder from the AD object.

[dhicks]

Does sharing the folders allow students to have access to their individual file paths?

 

Not quite sure what you mean, if you mean does the Mac automatically mount user network file areas then I can't actually remember - I think, as 3s-gtech points out, MacOS will be able to get a user's home folder, and I seem to remember it mounting that in a "home" link on the desktop. Using Jamf (or that might have just been a native MacOS feature, actually) you can redirect the user's local user area to the network, but that redirects their whole user area - not just the Desktop and Documents folders but folders used for things like iMovie to write working files in, which can result in a lot of traffic to your network file server. Ideally, I'd want the Desktop and Home folders to be on the network (so any application writing to a default save location would be writing to the network, so users could move devices from one session to the next without having to worry about remembering to save in a specific location) and for everything else to be local (for performance). I've tried to accomplish that with a logon script that redirects the appropriate folders at login time but never seemed to get anything reliable.

[3s-gtech]

An issue with local home folders on the Macs (which are better for reliability and performance) alongside the network home folder (this is an option when joining to AD) is that the local home folders will fill the disks if you have lots of users. My Macs have 250GB SSDs in them - combining Sibelius sounds and multiple users, plus the way MacOS bloats, they all filled up.