iSteve

iMovie will work over a network, but it is good practice to us it locally (large files / rendering etc). iPhoto likes HFS+ formatted (ie Mac) volumes for it's library. Our home folder servers are all Mac OS based so all our Macs and PCs are happy.

You could try forcing your com.apple.finalcutexpress.plist (or whatever it is called) on to your machines via MCX. What version of FCE are you running and what is your client OS?

Change their permissions on their home folder so that the don't have write access? There won't be a specific option to disable saving .app to the Desktop.

What is your set up - just Mac clients authenticating to AD? What's your setup in directory utility? Is your DNS water-tight? What does your Mac's system log say?

Seeing as the stand is a hinged component, would it not make more sense to test them through the body? All of our iMacs pass and we have dozens and dozens.

You could also boot in single user mode (power on and hold down cmd+s) and run fsck -fy at the prompt.

Also, this assumes that you have Remote Desktop / Management switched on on each Mac in your System Preferences > Sharing. You can activate this via command line SSH should you not want to move from the comfort of your coffee machine.

Authentication failed means an admin hasn't added the machines to the computer list. Either you : 1) Go to his machine and add the computers in to the All Computers list with your secret admin password as a one off 2) Manage your preferences and force the ARD.plist on his machine, where you have already set this up Then, he can control / observe etc. Admin users can copy items and so on, OR you can allow any user to do this in ARD > Preferences

iPhoto likes to save its stuff to HFS volumes

Did your Macs come with a trial copy of Office? It may be that the preferences still exist for it hence why it is prompting. We to have ESS, and deployed 2011 a few months back. It all worked fine. The only thing we did on top was to set a preference to get rid of the "here is your office ID" and "do you want to keep up to date" messages.

Another vote here for IceBerg. It's what we use to make packages (and indeed what we used to deploy Macromedia Studio 8).

Here we have network home directories served over AFP. Office, CS5 and most of iLife work fine in this way. We created a "temporary local space" folder on the root of each Mac, and tried to get any iMovie users to save their movie here first. The problem with this was that iMovie defaulted to the user's home folder, and staff could not comprehend the difference between working off the local machine and the network. Anyway, iMovie (certainly the older iMovie HD version) was happy to work over the network but I wouldn't recommend it. In our media studies room, we made the computers have a local log in so that the machines become edit macs rather than network computers. Kids work locally on the machines, and they are backed up via Retrospect. The odd iMovie file finding its way on the the network is fine, but if you have a bulk of users doing this then you may have space and bandwidth problems.

Hello, We have an ancient "Public" shared drive for staff with stacks of work on, some with special permissions currently running 2003 R2. We'd like to move this share to a more fit for purpose machine running 2008 R2. I've stumbled upon DFS and have set this up between both servers, and as far as I can see the Public share from the 2003 box has been replicated on the 2008 machine. Am I able to turn off DFS on the 2008 machine, and retire the 2003 box now that the files are on the new box, or is this not how it works? Thanks.

To manage the Windows side of your Mac, you need Group Policy via your AD Domain Controller. It counts as a "normal" PC. For the printer, add it as an IP printer.

Thanks guys. We had Wizteach but it was the Windows version supplied with the boards. I contacted their support and they said that the codes would work with the Mac version, we'd just need to download it.

We use Workgroup Manger to schedule power on weekdays just before lessons, and power off every day at 4pm. Apart from scheduling in this way, there isn't away AFAIK to start the machines from cold.

Hello, We have a load of Polyvision eno boards in our school, and a load of Macs. The boards work fine with the basic pen / drawing tools, however, I am trying to research what software is available to allow teachers to author snazzy content for the boards. What do you use? Do you just use PowerPoint? What's the best way to create content rather than handing over hundreds of pounds to Boardworks, per subject? Any steering in the right direction on this would be greatly appreciated.

They have done this for ages, even with Broadcom cards. You don't need a Mac server to show network/directory status in the login window. Simply run this command in Terminal: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow AdminHostInfo DSStatus That'll give you the red/amber/green lights.

We have disabled management of applications through Workgroup Manager as it was causing problems when certain apps try to launch helper apps. We just moved applications we didn't want students to run to the Administrator's desktop, or deleted them completely.

Another vote for PaperCut. We've run NG and MF from about 2006/2007. It works really well and is simple to set up.

Check your DNS is perfect for forward and reverse lookups. In directory utility, make sure your AD is the first item in the search path, and again, time has to be correct with your domain controller +/- 5 minutes I believe. Re - golden triangle. Run OS X server on any old second hand Mac, and you have a very cheap, secure solution to managing a small amount of Macs.

We have Citrix XenApp 5.5 running here, with apps published via a web page to users. I am looking at using the Citrix Online Plugin to make these apps available to users' start menu. I have made a new site with the PNagent, and can connect to the server using the online plug in, but receive this message when launching the plugin: "The remote server failed to execute the application launch request" I am stumped. I have looked on Citrix support and can't get any further. Does anyone here use XenApp that could suggest what might get this working? Thanks.

Hello, Not sure if anyone is still using these units, but we are and are too skint to replace them with more modern options (ie, Promise). As you may know, getting "official" Apple drives for these is difficult. We have had success getting the drive carriers and installing standard PATA drives inside them, but I found a website detailing using SATA drives in the old drive carriers (link to come). The solution is to use the StarTech sata2ide bridge, which is small enough to stand up in the drive carrier. This then allows you to use 2.5" SATA hard drives, or SSDs in the XServe RAID. This makes replacing drives MUCH cheaper than Apple's offerings. We are about to start trialling some WD Scorpio Black drives in our RAID. The site I found info on said the controllers will recognise up to 1TB drives. Good news for those still running these bits of kit.

We too use PaperCut, and it detects grayscale vs colour either per document or page, and charges appropriately. Are you saying yours doesn't do this, or not correctly?

Hello, We have a need to replace some Apple keyboards in our IT areas. Can any of you recommend a cheaper alternative to the £31 metal USB keyboards? I understand that ANY USB keyboard will work, but ideally I would like one with an Apple key so that if students are instructed to do "Apple C" to copy, half the room won't be confused as they only have a Windows key on their Mac! Any suggestions gratefully received. Thanks!