iSteve

The users should have a login items pane.... You could make a simple AppleScript app which tells the Finder to mount the drive. You can then launch the app and while it's in the dock, get the user to right click it and choose "Open At Login". Or if you have OS X Server running on your network, you can use Workgroup Manager (similar to Windows GP) to set a login item for that batch of Macs, or that group of users. Hope that helps.

Hello, We've just had a shiny new HP ProCurve 5406zl switch installed in to our current server room comms cabinet, in to which goes our current batch of servers. It's fitted with 14 fibre ports to feed other cabinets around the school in a star topology. During the summer, our server room is moving to an adjacent room after a refurb. However the comms cabinet is staying in the old room (literally next door). It has not been budgeted, or planned that the comms cabinet, with all it's fibre will be moving, so I am debating one of the following options.... 1). Run individual ethernet cables from each server, through a hole in the wall, back to the 5406zl switch. 2). Install a Procurve 1800-24G gigabit switch in each of our two server racks, make a 2Gb trunk to each switch from the 5406zl, meaning only running 4 cables which could be put in mini trunking, then having all the server connections accessible at the server racks I feel i should plug all my important stuff, ie the servers, straight in to our core switch, but for fault finding and tidyness would prefer to go for option number 2! What sort of real world performance hit would you get using option 2 - negligible? What would you do?

You want to move /System/Library/Speech/Synthesizers/MacinTalk.SpeechSynthesizer. What we do is move that whole folder to the Administrator's desktop just in case it's needed again, then we can move it back. We do this before we image our machines but it's easy to do retrospectively via Remote Desktop. Using ARD, you want to send this Unix command: mv -R /System/Library/Speech/Synthesizers/MacinTalk.SpeechSynthesizer /Users/Administrator/Desktop (which is move (mv), recursively (-R), the thing you want to move, to the new location).

I just spotted a post from someone saying an iMac 20" was £949. We pick ours up from a very large supplier for £609 with 2GB RAM.

eBay can be handy for DC-in/sound boards. I expect an Apple service part to be £££.

I'm quite interested in the DL360 G5 as it's a fairly powerful machine. Can anyone tell me if they support 6 hard drives out of the box? I have a 380 which only supported 4 as standard, requiring an add on card for any more. We have a couple of 360 G5s here, but I can't find any of the paperwork for them to see if we had to get an extra SAS controller as well (not ordered by me).

Hello, We're looking to purchase a new, more capable server four our Facility CMIS system. I have the specification requirements from Serco, but I was wondering if it's possible to get a rack mount server with an LTO tape drive built in that is not a tower with rack conversion kit? We favour HP servers but I can't see that they do such a machine! We use Retrospect software here and would use a copy with SQL open file support to backup the CMIS database and application to tape.

Are you doing this over a network, or working locally on the files on the local hard disk and exporting the result?

iMovie works in 'raw' DV which is around 13GB per hour of video. We use iMovie to capture footage, then export the video to a format of our choice to use in Teaching and Learning, allowing you to pick a suitable codec / compression settings to make good quality, low file size videos.

We've had this - its to do with TIFF decompression. Try updating QuickTime to the latest version on the Windows box.

I have 2 spares here that I was looking at. Yes- there's no way to do any conversion in them. I've emailed our supplier to see about spares / drives or even 'legit' ADMs. Future expansion could be an issue Thanks.

To add to DMcCoy's post - what he said will let you save the image to a destination like it was a file, ie, not wipe your destination.

Hello! I'm looking to expand storage in one of our Apple XServe RAIDs. I understand that these can utilise a standard hard disk in their Apple caddies to save the expense of buying an 'Apple' drive and caddy in one. The RAID takes IDE / Parallel ATA drives in it's slots. I'm trying to track down some 1TB PATA drives but am finding this a bit of a challenge. The Apple marked drives are Hitachi Deskstar units so I'd be keen to find these in a 1TB form. Do you know of where I can get a 1TB IDE drive these days?

Hello, We've been using iMovie HD here for a while and the limited number of students using it have been told to save their project files to a local folder on their Macs. However more and more students in other courses are now beginning to use iMovie and often their teachers have no idea about the issues of editing video or doing photo animation over a network and as a result the kids save to their home folders. This is slow and takes up far too much space etc etc. Aside from telling the whole staff where to save (which 90% wont listen to, 5% won't really understand what we mean and the other 5% are already doing it) is there a way, or a .plist we can force to make iMovie's default save location a folder on the local drive and NOT the network?

You can do this, it's what we do. Your Mac Server which the XServe RAID is connected to is probably sharing the home folders out over AFP, if you switch on Windows sharing in Server Admin you can connect by \\your-server\your-home-share from a Windows box, stick this path in your AD or whatever.

You can do this in Disk Utility. You create a disk image of the original, then burn the image to a blank disk. I assume you mean a home made DVD disk rather than a shop bought one? You can do the latter but I expect it is not suitable to speak about that on this forum. But as above, toast is easier to use with it's straight 'copy' function, but you have to buy it.

I haven't tested Camino properly, but I like the way it uses the system proxy without by default. Do you know if there is away to force the home page to something other than the camino start page? I'm tinkering with some prefs but I haven't found where to make them default, or part of the app!

Hello, We're starting to get some really irritating issues with Safari and FireFox 3 on our Macs with network home directories (roaming profiles, if you like). Safari usually likes to crash on launch, which I understand is a known problem, although the latest 3.2.1 update doesn't fix this too well last time I checked. Our default browser on our Macs is FireFox3. This writes parentlock files when it is opened, and deletes them when you close the app. If the app crashes or a child re-launches FFox before it's deleted the lock file, it tells us that the application is already running. We have set up a login script to delete the file, but if a kid gets a problem during their session, they have to run this script manually to delete it. It's a pain. I'm about to look in to a new browser such as Camino, but I thought I would get your views on your best Mac browsers on your networks.... :confused:

Normally we'd install the package via Apple Remote Desktop. I'm only doing a new image as we have a large amount of new software to deploy, too. This way when we get new machines, I don't have to send out extra packages and scripts to make them current.

Ooh. We were 48 hours from starting to roll out a new 10.5.5 image. The main thing it fixes for us from an end user PoV was Safari. It used to instantly quit on any network user's account. Works fine now.

Depending on how long the movie is, this is a bit of a long time! Are you exporting to a local disk or over a network, and what compression settings are you using? PS - it's not a G5

I don't know if this would be of any use to anyone setting up, or considering setting up a mixed platform computer network, but I though I'd post how our network is set up incase it's of any help. At the moment, we have a Windows 2000 domain controller with a small Citrix Metaframe XP server farm. This DC holds all user accounts for our school of 1500 students and 130 staff. All Windows XP machines, and Macs are bound/joined to Active Directory. Home folders are stored on two Apple XServe RAID units - one for students and one for staff. These don't have to be Apple, but for us they are. They serve home folders by SMB to Windows clients, and AFP to our Macs. Although the Macs could be served over SMB too if you wanted a Windows home folder server. We have a G5 X Serve server running Mac OS X Server 10.5 which is bound to Active Directory, and is also an Open Directory (Apple's AD) master. Our client's have this LDAP server in their authentication list so that they can pick up Managed Preferences. We have a set of managed preferences for Staff and a set for Students (two groups). Typically these are proxy settings, printers by room, login window text saying "Welcome to xxxxx" and reminding students that computer use is monitored. Any special machines which need specific preferences have them set under the computer account section of Workgroup Manager (WGM) - for example we have the bluetooth system preference available on art computers where students swap around some Wacom graphics tablets. Printing is managed by MCX (Managed Client for X, or managed preferences). Printers are set up on a Windows 2003 server with printing services for Unix installed. Macs are set to print to LPR queues with an appropriate driver - either the manufacturers own or a free ppd from linuxprinting.org, often helpful to get Macs printing to older / crappy inkjets. This server also runs PaperCut NG so that we can limit student printing. Staff can only print by entering a PIN number so that their costs are charged to their department. The PaperCut client is a login item forced by MCX so it opens when kids log in. To cut down network traffic on our 10.4 machines (which are 90% of our Macs), we use a local home folder setup. We have a script which copies a clean, custom home folder from a template when a student or staff member logs in, it then links the users Desktop, Documents and Pictures to their location on the network. This also lets us set up preferences for applications which cannot be managed by OS X Server. Our 10.5 machines with their cache redirection are pure network homes machines (equivalent to roaming profiles in Windows), where Dock settings, bookmarks and icon arrangements follow students from machine to machine. We use a selection of write only folders on a shared server as 'drop boxes', so that kids can hand work in to teachers by dropping them in the teacher's folder. We have a world read-writable folder on the hard disk of each Mac so that any students who wish to audio or video edit can do so reliably without choking the network, or writing 13GB DV files to our servers. When students log in to Windows, they get the same deal - their Desktop and My Docs are mapped to the network. Printers are managed by a login script using 'con2prt'. This is the same for staff, too. We also utilise our Citrix farm to provide access to Windows only software in a 'seamless' window. For example, students can log in to their Macs, then launch 'ChemSketch" which is a chemical structure drawing app. This will launch a Windows login box on their screen, they log in, then ChemSketch appears like it was a Mac app.....but it's running on a Windows terminal server. They can then copy and paste between the Mac OS and Windows enviroments. We use NetBoot on another Mac server to host netinstall images. We have a 10.5 Intel image, a 10.4 Intel image and a 10.4 PPC image which can be remotely installed onto any of our Macs if they break. We then use Apple Remote Desktop to run a script on them to bind them to Active Directory after installation, as well as to install any software and help end users via remote control or text messaging. Our Mac machines range from 700MHz 'lampshade' iMac G4s, to 20" Core2Duo iMacs. There's even one 400MHz G4 left in a classroom which is still used, and no one complains it's slow! We have an old G5 running 10.4 client and Web iPhoto Access - this allows us to share the school photo library to staff via iPhoto on the Mac, and via a web interface on Windows (or Mac!) - very handy when staff want to produce promo materials as all photos are tagged with keywords and are instantly searchable. Mac laptops run portable home folders - meaning they sync in the background to be up to date with the user's network documents. Windows laptops use offline files if their hard disks are big enough to cope. Antivirus is served from a Windows server to both platforms using Sophos Enterprise Manager. All clients auto update from this. We're also licensed to offer updating to staff members' home machines via our LEA's main Sophos server, which is nice. Over the summer we're moving our AD server and Citrix servers to Server 2008, from Win 2000, as we need to support inter domain trusts so students can have access to our systems from home. Oh, and we have around 450 machines in total. Plus some random Asus eeePCs. That's how our system works in a nut shell. If you have any questions feel free to message me!

Sometimes iMovie minutes can be misleading....What Mac/spec machine are you doing this on?

You can Export to QuickTime under the Share menu. iMovie will give you some default compression settings (web, email cd-rom) or you can click expert settings and set your compression settings yourself - look on the web for info on codecs and settings. This will give you a QuickTime file you can then burn to CD/DVD, but you can't burn from within iMovie (at least not iMovie HD - might be different on '08). Alternatively, you can export to iDVD which will make the movie play like a shop purchased DVD with a menu etc

Will run fine. The only thing that won't work is the monitoring tools as the eMac does not have the hardware of an Xserve to monitor! We've run OS X server for various reasons on 1st gen Power Mac G5s, old 'sawtooth' G4s (400Mhz).