Macs 4 n00bs! How? What? Why?

[Zoom7000]

We have 2 classrooms of Apple Macs and we are now a specialist Music & Media School. We had a technician working with us last year who was a great help in setting up the Macs and integrating them with AD, installing software on them and almost everything else to do with them. For reasons totally baffling to me, (purely political) his contract was not renewed and we are now left with 2 classrooms of Macs and the NM and I are sat twidling our thumbs thinking what to do next. We're supposed to be TUPEd to RM in October, but I haven't heard anything more of that since I visited them at the start of the month...

 

Anyway we are in the process of migrating to Smoothwall and we need to deploy the new proxy server address to all of the Macs. We also need to deploy Comic Life and Office 2008 to the Macs.

 

We are total n00bs when it comes to Macs and anything we're trying is pretty much trial and error. Our setup is 2 classrooms of Macs, 16 in Music and 15 in Media, 2 Macbooks and a Mac Pro. These all authenticate to AD via a Mac Server.

 

Is there also anyway of locking the stations down in a similar way to group policy?

 

Any help is very much appreciated!

[Pyroman]

I'd do a quick search of the mac forum, there's bound to be loads of stuff

[kingswood]

We have 2 classrooms of Apple Macs and we are now a specialist Music & Media School. We had a technician working with us last year who was a great help in setting up the Macs and integrating them with AD, installing software on them and almost everything else to do with them. For reasons totally baffling to me, (purely political) his contract was not renewed and we are now left with 2 classrooms of Macs and the NM and I are sat twidling our thumbs thinking what to do next. We're supposed to be TUPEd to RM in October, but I haven't heard anything more of that since I visited them at the start of the month...

 

Anyway we are in the process of migrating to Smoothwall and we need to deploy the new proxy server address to all of the Macs. We also need to deploy Comic Life and Office 2008 to the Macs.

 

We are total n00bs when it comes to Macs and anything we're trying is pretty much trial and error. Our setup is 2 classrooms of Macs, 16 in Music and 15 in Media, 2 Macbooks and a Mac Pro. These all authenticate to AD via a Mac Server.

 

Is there also anyway of locking the stations down in a similar way to group policy?

 

Any help is very much appreciated!

 

First of all, "don't panic"

 

I think the quickest option for you right now (since there is no mention of an OS X Server in the mix) is to bite the bullet and just spend an hour or two configuring the machines the way you need them. Manually put the proxy server address into your machines, or use a script to do it for you;

 

networksetup -setwebproxy Ethernet off

networksetup -setwebproxystate Ethernet on

 

The above can be used by utilising SSH on each of the machines?

 

Put the comic life and Office 2008 installation packages onto a share that all your Macs can access and install them from the share (much like you would a distribution point in Windows).

 

This isn't the best way of doing things but without ARD and some experience packaging and deploying applications and images you are a bit limited.

 

Locking your stations down can be as easy as using parental controls to manage a local group/users on the macs (leopard) or else using an OS X Server to push out the MCX settings required (you obviously need OS X Server and at least a Mac Mini to do this from). This is very similar to group policy.

 

Hope that helps even a little!

 

Paul

[HodgeHi]

Comic Life is just a .app file that can be copied. I would recommend getting a copy of ARD asap. It will make your life 1000 times easier. Deploying stuff through this is a cinch.

 

To deploy comic life through ARD. Configure the clients for ARD access. Install the ARD admin on a separate machine and scan the network for the macs. Select the ones you want and go file> add selection to a new list or something like that. Now when the machines have been put into a group you can slect the group and click on copy. drag the comic life .app into the top window and then choose applications folder form the drop down list. Make sure inherit permissions from location folder or whatever it is and click copy. This should complete in about 5 minutes.

 

The comic life license. The best way i found to do this is add comic life to a client and then register it. Then drag the plasq folder out of the /library/application support/ folder which is found here:

 

drive OS is installed on > library > Application Support

 

You can use ARD to do this and drag the file from the remote screen onto your local desktop. Then from here you can deploy the plasq folder the same way you deployed the comic life .app

 

The preferences would be best managed through workgroup manager on an OS X Server. If you don't have one then it maybe best to get a small mac mini with a copy of server. make sure you have some decent amount of ram though as leopard needs 1gb on its own really.

 

Good luck with it all

[Zoom7000]

We do have a Mac Server (OS X) it currently provides AD authentication and maybe even policies, not sure on the policies though. We've been using ARD to update the machines.

 

Thanks for your help though guys.