iSteve

It is better to allow all applications, and prevent access to certain ones using WGM than it is to only allow listed applications. Blocking is infinitely more reliable than allowing (from experience, and from what Antonio Rocco told us on site!) and will probably solve your problem.

CMD V will do verbose. You can then follow the instruction before the prompt to do a disk check (fsck -fy). CMD+ALT (option)+O+F will boot you to open firmware where you can do reset-nvram (enter) reset-all We had a load of early G5s which had odd boot issues which were all symptoms of logic board failure (this mostly affected dual 1.8 and dual 2.0 from 2003/4)

I don't think you can do this. We had it running when we were running Open Directory, as that did the authentication and you ticked the box in WGM and it just worked. Since we moved to AD you have the Windows machine doing the authentication things start to get....well, they don't work. You could create a login hook that creates or copies a file called 'user' in their home folder. If that file already exists it logs the user out. You'd then have a logout hook that rm's the file on clean log out. However this will be annoying of the machine crashes and there isn't a clean log out for the user as it won't let them log in at all (similar to Firefox not exiting properly!).

Thanks for your help

We have no control over it (nor over our switches). I will see if our LA have any best practice ways of doing this as I doubt we are the first in this position. I just want to make sure we have a plan B, rather than things going wrong then retrospectively coming up with a plan as is all too common in schools...well mine anyway!

Hello, We are about to move over to Progresso from Facility CMIS. The deal has already been signed and the decision making / running of is not under my remit. I digress... I understand that it is fully web based and hosted by Progresso outside. Whilst our CPSN Internet connection is fairly reliable, there will be the odd occasion when this drops out for 5 minutes, or half a lesson or at worst a couple of hours. Are any of you using backup Internet connections, or even HSDPA routers to get online when your traditional means fails?

How do you find headphone quality vs breakages? Our current ICT team by very cheap small headphones which break if you look at them. Do you find that if you buy a more 'solid' pair that they get more respect because they are not cheap and nasty in look and feel?

The machine was maxed with 2TB drives and we were upping capacity on the cheap. Like I say I had assumed that as the onboard controller just worked, an add on controller would cope or be flashable. Anyway it's not a problem. I will see if we can look in to getting a different controller.

SYNACK - It's 2008 r2 64bit, which boots from a 160GB drive. The BIOS sees and works with the 3TB drives on the onboard controller, therefore does the issue not lie with the E200 controller and firmware on that? If AHCI was the problem would it not have problems working with the drives on the onboard controller? MICHAEL - The E200 supports up to 2TB per drive, but with a 3TB it only sees 800GB (there's geek explanations online about this limitation across a variety of hardware). I had, wrongly, assumed that if the vanilla onboard controller on a cheap server could work with large drives, the E200 would be upgradable to cope too. Seems I am wrong! Can anyone advise on a suitable HP controller that would work? I'm not too familiar with options for the DL180 series in the current market. Thanks again for your help so far. I guess as everything is as up to date as it goes, replacing this controller is the only option to get full use from the drives.

SYNACK - The server has the latest BIOS as of last week. The 3 drives on the on board/ built in controller show as 3TB and are in use as such in Windows. The BIOS is not set to AHCI as this causes Windows to die on boot. I used the F8 option to 'configure' the drive on the E200. The only options available are to make a logical volume, view one, or delete one. I understand I can make a RAID volume of 3TB plus, but ideally I want to use 3TB single drives. GLENNDA - Thanks for the link. The BIOS is at the latest, and the machine is not running any of those P series storage controllers listed on the page.

Hello, We're updating a backup server here. We have a Dl180 G5 which has 3x 3TB drives running from the built in SATA controller. All working fine. The server has a Smart Array E200 card running the other 4 drive bays, which only allows you to create the usual ~800GB volume from a 3TB drive. I have updated the firmware to 1.86 on the card, to no avail. Does anyone know if there is any later firmware for the E200 to allow use of 3TB on a single drive? If not, can anyone suggest a controller card to replace the E200 which will allow use of 3TB drives. We are not running RAID on the card, just single drives. Thanks.

Apple Hardware Test (on consumer CDs) is not the same as Apple Service Diagnostic, but the hardware test will help you out. Glad you're semi-sorted.

You'd have to have a look "online". It's a service tool so not available to Joe Public. If you have a relationship with the reseller you got the machines from they may be able to help you out.

I expect that's down to the infinite variations of how end users' networks / domains are set up. You would either need to research and implement it yourself, or pay a company to do it for you. With some research it's easily achievable without paying £££ to a 3rd party if you have some time and the aptitude for it.

What machine is this? When you say they don't boot from the network / CD / HDD are the machines locking up? If so I would suggest checking or swapping out the RAM. Failing that source (!) and Apple Service Diagnostic CD for your model of machine which will thoroughly test each hardware component to narrow down any hardware issue. If the computer is under warranty, sending it off or taking it to a store will take care of this. You can also boot the machine holding down T to put it in target disk mode. Whilst in this mode connect it to a working Mac with a firewire cable. The drives will mount on the desktop of the working machine and you will be able to run Disk Utility or similar on the bad Mac's disks from the working one. Hope that helps.

Apologies for going OT but this sort of thing really bugs me. We had an ICT Teacher on interview last week and they mentioned that their network manager refused to touch any Macs, meaning that she had to set up her own network for the Macs - as a teacher. Now, any network manager is there to support the network, not just MS OS. A Mac, Linux box, whatever is just a computer when it comes down to it. You wouldn't get teachers refusing to teach certain children because they speak with a northern accent instead of a London accent. Bad analogy but you get the idea. /grumble

This is odd. We run a couple of hundred Macs, authenticating against AD with files stored on OSX server shared over AFP with 10.6.8 on the client and server. We redirect all cashes to the local machine. Your problem is reminiscent of how we first had things under 10.4 with NO redirection. There has to be some sort of network problem here, either name resolution or caching. You could set your Macs to have portable home directories - similar to Windows where it downloads a copy rather than running off the network. How many clients connect before things start to go wrong, by the way?

Boot them in single user mode (Apple +S on boot), run fsck -fy to check the drive structure.

Moblie Accounts, or portable home directories are the equivalent of offline files in Windows land. When we assign a laptop to a member of staff we also give them admin rights on the local machine, this way they can install their home printer / scanner etc.

The management console for want of a better phrase for Impero is Windows only, even though it offers control of Mac OS machines. We 'lock down' ARD for our staff. We log in, set up ARD as we wish staff to see it, then take the plist from ~/Users/Administrator/Library/Preferences/com.apple.remotedesktop.plist, then force this on the machines using Workgroup Manager. This way they only see tool bar options that they need to use, and will only pick up machine lists for the room they are in, rather than the whole site or the last room they used. Works nicely.

We do all of our Mac server / client / hardware support ourselves in-house. They are just computers

Thanks for your reply. The only Citrix component on our DC is the part that puts your published applications on to a web page. I believe that if we move this to one of the other servers that we are leaving alone, things should be ok, but I will check.

Thanks Michael, so just to be clear in my mind: 1). Fix the replication 2). Update the schema on the current/old 2008 server 3). Build the 2008R2 machine, and promote to DC 4). Build second R2 box and have this replicate the new DC 5). Get rid of old 2008 machine Then adapt / remake GPOs etc to suit

Hello, We currently have a Server 2008 domain. We have a server providing AD and DNS services, with a second server replicating these roles. Over the years our domain controller has been upgraded from previous versions of Windows Server (not by me) and we are now left with this 2008 machine with a legacy AD / group policy set up which does not suit the current design of our network. We have also found that our secondary server seems to take over on the network, and does not properly replicate group policy settings anymore (for example, the domain controller has new group policy proxy settings to push to clients, when the secondary server is online it becomes the logon server and pushes out old proxy settings refusing to replicate the new settings...odd). My plan is to build a new Server 2008 R2 domain controller, and re-do our group policy to fit the needs of the school from the ground up. My question is, is there a way to migrate user accounts from the old 2008 machine to the new 2008 R2 machine? We do not want any of the old groups / group policy stuff, just the user accounts to save on re-making them. Can anyone offer advice on if there is a way to do this, or if we are better off just recreating user accounts etc. As a side issue, we also run Citrix XenApp 5.5 which is running on 4 other Server 2008 machines. I understand that 5.5 does NOT run on R2. Seeing as these Citrix servers are just standard / member servers, there shouldn't be any problems leaving these as 2008 machines in the 2008 R2 domain, correct?

You could always buy refurb XServe or iMac to allow you to stick with 10.6?