Profiles on MacOS - Shared Device

[klue]

Hi All,

 

we have about 100 mac's (iMac, MACmini) at the moment we use the guest account feature. (if the student loggs out all Settings and Files are removed) this works very well.

if the student wants to save documents, they have file shares with user /pwd (nomad)

 

how do i change to personal accounts? the problem the profiles stay on client and students use random mac's. -> diskspace / cleaup old profiles / files stay on fixed systems.... (no roaming profiles)

in a further step we also have 60 Windows Clients but i thinks its a bad idea to merg this files. so the two profiles will stay seperatly

 

In the early days we used a temporary user and cleaned it up using scripts / jampf. since apple keeps changing things (security settings - containers, keychain,...) there have always been problems that the cleanup has not gone through properly

 

 

now my question, How do you solve the problem? how do you use this in your schools?

 

thanks klue

[3s-gtech]

Our users on Macs have their AD home drive available, and I map a couple of shares too.

 

They have normal profiles, and every year I go through and delete the old profiles to clean some space up - necessary when audio files for the software take up 100GB or so! This is a bit of a pig of a job, but we only have 45 Macs total.

[georgeescott]

we also have 60 Windows Clients but i thinks its a bad idea to merge these files. So the two profiles will stay separately

 

Why do you think this is a bad idea?

 

 

now my question, How do you solve the problem? how do you use this in your schools?

 

We currently bind our Macs to AD. Students log in with their AD credentials. We don’t enable ‘mobile accounts’ except for staff MacBooks. I hope to replace AD binding with the ‘Platform SSO’ coming out with Ventura though https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2022/10045 (11:20). Or you can use NoMAD or something like Jamf Connect.

 

In previous years, we mapped their home drive stored on a Windows file server. Now, we force them to log in to OneDrive on login and set that as their default Finder view. Students save directly to OneDrive where the app/file type will allow, or save locally and then copy it across at the end of the lesson.

 

We’ve started refreshing our Intel iMacs for M1 models, but they come with smaller SSD’s and the costs to increase the capacity are eye-watering. Going from a 1TB HDD to 256GB SSD is a big step down. We started running in to storage issues quickly as we have Adobe, Logic, GarageBand and Sibelius. Including the massive sound libraries that to go with them.

 

I created a startup script that cleans up the /Users libraries only (documents, desktop etc.) after several weeks of no modification, but keeps the ~/Library folder so that they’re kept signed in to apps like OneDrive/Office.

If they then haven’t logged in for at least a month, we clear their profile from /Users and /Library/Managed Preferences/.

 

I’ll start looking in to OneDrive Known Folder Move (KFM) for macOS later in the year to see how it works with apps, but I’m not holding my breath.

Edited September 30, 2022 by georgeescott