dayzd

You'll probably want to restrict access to the Mac App Store and Software Update, for two. Probably all of the /Applications/Utilities directory as well. It's largely up to you, however. When I set up our Macs, I simply tried to emulate as much as I could from our Windows network, so that application/network access were similar, as were account preferences and settings. I.E. our pupils cannot change their wallpaper on Windows, so I removed access to the Desktop & Screensaver settings in System Preferences, so they couldn't on the mac, either. I also restricted the menu items in the top bar so only the clock and volume control appear, set application access lists and limited some of directory navigation outside of a users' home area so pupils couldn't poke around where they shouldn't. By no means will you get as granular a level of control as in AD networks, but most of the important stuff is covered in WGM and any other holes can be patched with a little scripting and system editing if you look hard enough. (For example I edited the Finder so that "Go to Folder..." and "Connect to Server..." were no longer available in the "Go" menu.)

To edit machine settings, you need to be working in the XServe's Open Directory - AD doesn't support MCX (Managed Client for OS X - the records used to control Mac clients). In your XServe's directory (it should be the local one), make a machine group. You should then be able to add your AD computers as members of this computer group (assuming your XServe is bound properly to your AD, and your AD is properly set in your XServe's search path - check with "Directory Utility.app" in /System/Library/CoreServices). Once your AD records for your Macs are members of the group you made, you can set the policies you want via the machine group with WGM. [ N.B. Your iMac's need to be bound to both your AD and your XServe's OpenDirectory for this to work. ]

What shares are you mapping - are they generic shared folders, or are they individual shares per user? The basic command for mapping a share in a bash script is as follows (and assumes you're using AFP filesharing): #!/bin/bash # Create a mount point within the filesystem mkdir /Volumes/shareName # Mount the share to the mount point /sbin/mount -t afp afp://your.server/share /Volumes/shareName This will mount afp://your.server/share as a volume called shareName You'll also need a LogoutHook to unmount the share you added at login: #!/bin/bash # Unmount share /sbin/umount /Volumes/shareName # Delete mount point used from file system rmdir /Volumes/shareName If you need to map a specific share for a user, LoginHook scripts are passed the current username as $1, so you can use this variable in the path if you require: #!/bin/bash mkdir /Volumes/shareName /sbin/mount -t afp afp://your.server/$1 /Volumes/shareName This will mount afp://your.server/ as a volume called shareName If you need to use authentication you need to change your share address to something like this #!/bin/bash mkdir /Volumes/shareName /sbin/mount -t afp afp://username:[email protected]/share /Volumes/shareName However, the above will only work if you want to use just one account to mount the share with. You can't have the user enter their password into a loginhook script as it runs. For example, I use the above method to mount a share during the login process to copy some files from the server, before disconnecting at the end of the login script, i.e.: #!/bin/bash mkdir /Volumes/loginfiles /sbin/mount -t afp afp://serviceuseraccount:[email protected]/loginfiles /Volumes/loginfiles # File copying and other stuff happens here /sbin/umount /Volumes/loginfiles rmdir /Volumes/loginfiles Also, once you've written your *.sh script, you'll need to make it executable in the Terminal: chmod +x yourscript.sh Hope this gets you started!

Yeah, if you put those locations into the Applications tab under 'Disallow applications within these folders'. I've never explicitly banned apps in the CoreServices folder though, as I would imagine you get some OS usability problems if you do. You're probably better off finding ways of making sure they can't access it in the first place. I assume pupil accounts are non-administrator? In which case they shouldn't be able to get into it anyway.

Cheers. I'll be trying anything I can get my hands on, so I'll let you know if I have any luck!

I built my machine (i7 2600K, Gigabyte motherboard, 16GB ram and Quadro 1800FX) for about £600, but I already had graphics card, case, hard drives, cd drives, Windows 7 license etc. I totalled up the build and from scratch it would have cost around £900 (but doesn't have such a high-spec motherboard, blu-ray drive, SSD or such large hard drives in the first place, which would add at least £300 to be roughly comparable to the above linked machine). I would have said that's pretty good, assuming the warranty/support is good. The pluses of the pre-built machine are obviously, as mentioned, warranty and support, and known component reliability. I also had a pig of a time building my machine because it has a massive heatsink! Personally I prefer to build my own machines, but if you're happier buying one, I'd say you're not doing bad on that offer!

Sadly this did not work. Majorly bummed out now... (Not to mention heavily out of pocket!) The RAID controller accepted the new Disk 4 as the fourth disk of a RAID5 array. But a new, separate RAID5. The controller software set it out like this: RAID ARRAY 1 <-- Original, broken array Disk 1 - 1500GB Good Disk 2 - 1500GB Good Disk 3 - Offline Disk 4 - Offline RAID ARRAY 2 <-- New 'phantom' array Disk 1 - Offline Disk 2 - Offline Disk 3 - Offline Disk 4 - 1500GB Good <-- newly cloned disk Going to look into software raid recovery utilities over the weekend, as the controller/software does not support telling it 'Actually, that disk belongs HERE'... "Help me, Obi-RAID Recovery-Kenobi". You're my only hope!"

If that's your budget, get as much memory as you can fit in the machine you get. I read an article somewhere (can't remember where) that recommends minimum of 2GB ram per processor. If you're going the i7 route you effectively have 8 cores (4 hyperthreading) so you'll need a minimum of 16GB for Adobe video products to use the cores effectively. If you can fit more, go for it - you should only see benefit. When it comes to graphics cards, current top-spec gaming cards are very capable, but as @steveg suggested, a properly supported CUDA card will be best. nVidia's range of Quadro cards are designed for just this sort of thing and offer OpenGL/CUDA support with hardware accelerated playback during editing plus they accelerate a range of effects within Adobe video software (colour filters, blurs, scaling is just the start - see here for more on CUDA acceleration). Again, similar to @steveg's machine, a RAID array will do you all kinds of good for keeping disk speed up. Most motherboards I've looked at that support i7 processors have the Intel Storage manager type stuff in them to do arrays on board - some/most do RAID5 (I know my Gigabyte P67-based board does) and Windows 7 supports it out of the box without additional drivers. I imagine the controllers support SSD-based RAIDs that would be astonishingly fast, but my personal opinion towards SSDs based on other articles I've read is that SSDs have too short a lifespan for this kind of thing. (But I won't go into all that here as there's other threads discussing SSDs on Edugeek! E.G. Crucial C300 64Gb SSD) Hopefully that helps point you in the direction of what's worth looking at!

You may wanna try booting the MacBook into Safe Mode. --It's much like Windows' safe mode - only essential services are used and minimal drivers/extensions are loaded. If you can get logged in with safe mode, that should give you an indication if the problem is with the machine, or a service or network connection that it is waiting on, like @Dos_Box suggests. Check newly installed software, startup items in System Preferences, or if you're familiar with them, the LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons folders in /System/Libary. From my point of view, it sounds more like it's waiting for something or is stuck on something, as once you're past the grey loading screen with the Apple logo and spinning gear, the bulk of the OS and drivers etc are loaded. Have you installed something new recently?

That's my next plan of action. I've been looking into finding another drive of the same type to try that with, but they're not the newest model and are a little harder to find, it seems!

Sorry for being snappy. The prospect of losing 2.5TB (the raid wasn't full...) of data which constitutes pretty much everything I have made/done/downloaded etc for the last 10 years is making me cranky. (Also not having the best day in the workplace so far, either!) The fourth disk requires all of the first three to rebuild fully, but only two are online, hence my problem.

I've thought about that, but the RAID card I have (Highpoint RocketRaid 1740) doesn't offer the facility to turn off SMART checks. And to be honest, I'm not surprised by that! ;-)

I know I won't gain the full 2TB of space -I understand how RAID5 works, thanks, and that wasn't part of the question. Also, thanks for the 'read the manual' answer. You think I ask strangers to spare their time reading about my problems if I've not even bothered to read the manual? Thanks.

Right, I'm in something of a pickle and could do with some help and advice. I have a 4-disk RAID5 at home, which has had some failures... First, a disk failed through too many SMART errors (reallocated sectors), and as far as I can tell HADN'T finished rebuilding before a second drive failed with I/O errors. A week ago, my array looked like this Disk 1 - 1500GB Good Disk 2 - 1500GB Good Disk 3 - 1500GB Good Disk 4 - 1500GB FAILED - SMART errors After Disk 4 failed, I replaced it with a larger drive and left it to rebuild... Disk 1 - 1500GB Good Disk 2 - 1500GB Good Disk 3 - 1500GB Good Disk 4 - 2000GB CRITICAL - Rebuilding What I think what happened next was the I/O failure of Disk 3: Disk 1 - 1500GB Good Disk 2 - 1500GB Good Disk 3 - 1500GB FAILED - I/O errors Disk 4 - 2000GB CRITICAL - Rebuilding Now I know at this point, anyone who understands RAID5 would say I'm up a small stream without an appropriate implement... ...And they'd probably be right, but I'm desperate to fix this! What I've done is tried to clone the original Disk 4 (SMART errors) to a second new 2000GB drive using dd in Ubuntu. It seemed to work, although it went astonishingly fast (around 110MB/s average). Sadly, I'm not sure I did it right, as the RAID controller does not accept this new disk 4 as part of my RAID. Should this even work? Does anyone have any suggestions what else I could try? I'm sure there must be something I can do to rebuild my array, as I still have two original disks, and a third that simply has SMART errors (it's still readable, just not reliable). Cheers, Dayzd (And please let's not have too many people saying 'You're screwed'. I know I am. This whole thing stings enough as it is...)

Hahaha! Flying past the White House with a large label on the side of the ship stating 'Protected by Norton Internet Security'!

Technically, you don't need an OS X Server to run the NetBoot service - if you're prepared to go without official support, that is... Make any Mac a NetBoot Server | mac geekery

Those IE plugins you can get for Firefox (and probably others) won't work on OS X as all they do is hook a copy of the version of IE already within Windows into a Firefox browser window, rather than carry the IE application itself.

From what I've read elsewhere on the blog that link came from, he and his team typically use Windows 7 (with Trim) and do lots of programming/development. I do expect those SSDs took quite a hammering day to day...

That's impressive. Watched it with the sound off though, which on second viewing may have been more impressive!

Not trying to throw a spanner in the works, but you may want to look into the lifespan of current SSDs. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror (and co-founder of StackOverflow) recently wrote an article about his personal and professional experience of SSD lifespan, which, I'll be honest, has put me off using them for a while yet... At least personally.

I'd say Adobe After Effects. I've seen (and done) the tutorial for making the zoom effect at the start, and I would image that the 'tracking' of cars/bicycles etc was done using tracking points and some clever expressions maybe to detect 'collisions' and change the colours. Or they keyframed it manually...

I've used XXClone to do this in the past. It doesn't do a block-for-block copy, it just copies all files using the regular copy mechanism from one drive to the other, then makes the new one bootable. It's worked for me a couple of times. Just be sure you don't erase your original drive until you've used and rebooted the new one a couple of times to make sure there are no bugs!

Optimus Whine: After describing a problem, following up with as many superfluous reasons as possible why their problem is so urgent that you simply MUST fix it right away, even when you've already begun working to fix said problem, right in front of them. Persistinator: Emailing HoDs/line management about minor issue/problem, despite being told the solution five times over in their previously logged Helpdesk calls. C.C. King: CC'ing HoDs/line management about a newly/un- reported issue to either A) make it look like support's fault, or B) implicitly excuse themselves for failing to do something on time/properly.

Yes! Likin' that!

We found 2 of those beige beasties that had been forgotten about at the back of a storage dump a few years ago. We kept them hanging around for a few months for the 'I'll mod that one day' project like Butuz, but eventually dumped them. Of course, that was after we'd ridden them like chariots around the hall for a bit and looked at the logistics of turning them into remote control mobile tables/robot wars machines (would'a been more expensive than it was useful).