seawolf

Well, "force local home drive" pretty much does what it says - it forces the local drive to be used for the users profile. Fortunately, it's very easy for you to fix.

User-level Profiles don't work very reliably and certainly not on first login. Computer-level profiles usually work quite well though. Best solution I've found is to script the install of user level profiles at login and removal at logout. Since a profile is just XML and can be exported, they can be pushed and pulled in this way. WGM worked much, much better for user-level settings.

Yes, you could do it that way. Or, you could package it with something like JAMF Composer, Iceberg, etc. and push it out using ARD. That's we do with a few of the VPP apps we buy from the App store. We've paid for the licensing, we just don't use Apple's default deployment method.

If whatever is going on is blocking the Snapchat App on iOS, please let us all know how it's being done once you figure it out. That is what we are trying to accomplish here.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda I reckon. Just shows how lacking in vision and courage the other manufacturers were/are. It's kind of like saying that the athlete who constantly choked during crucial moments would have been better than anyone ever, if he hadn't choked constantly. But they weren't great. They choked. Every time.

Yeah, perhaps, but since when do most vendors state how much well their software will scale? Apple don't claim it to be an Enterprise-level solution and most Mac techs you'd speak to wouldn't recommend it for large scale deployments. The fact that Apple stopped making true business-grade server kit a few years ago was a huge signal in that regard. Apple has left that market for solutions like Casper Suite, Absolute Manage, FileWave, Puppet, Munki/Simian, etc. Honestly, any tech who expects a $20 app to provide enterprise level performance (especially when running on a Mac mini "server") should really step back and consider what they were thinking. In the days of OSX Server when it was actually its own OS running on am Xserve - it was a different story. The scale is partially dependant on the hardware capabilities (and artially on server being an "app"), and so perhaps if you used a well spec'd new Mac Pro you would be able to scale to several hundred or 1,000 without a problem. Haven't tried something of that scale with server app, and don't want to be the first. If anyone does let me know how it goes.

Ummm...1920 x 1200 is quite a ways off from 2880 x 1800. But hey - a million or a billion - what's the difference besides 3 extra zeros? Just don't take up a career in accounting.

We haven't used triangle method for a couple of years. We just bind then to AD and use Profiles and scripts to manage them. Options to to this are Profile Manager, manually pushing profiles via ARD, Casper Suite, Absolute Manage, or Puppet/Munki. We are currently using Casper and toying with Puppet/Munki - the combo is looking very powerful. p.s. ExtremeZ-IP Does work very well, and you could also look at AdmitMac or Centrify to manage the Macs within your existing AD using GPOs.

I get a kick out of you...yur funny I'm just trying to figure out what other companies were using high PPI screens in their laptops at the time Apple released them to market. Can't think of any. That would kind of make them "unique" and special ordered rather than just grabbing something from off the shelf from the "friendliest" manufacturer at the time. Of course, if there were loads if other PC manufacturers using high PPI screens before or at the same time as Apple did, then please feel free to clear the air

Profile Manager is generally pretty good up until about 100 Mac clients or so. Hats the market it was designed for (SMB). If you are larger than that, look at Puppet/Munki/DeployStudio, Casper Suite, FileWave, Absolute Manage, etc. You could also use Profile Manager to create the profiles, export them and then push them out using Apple Remote Desktop.

It is possible to redirect specific folders to different share locations with login scripts. We've done it, but it can be messy and as AR said editing and rendering video over a network share is not a good idea unless you've got a 10GbE connection to hybrid storage, etc. which is very unlikely. I would recommend setting up your Macs to either use Mobile homes or force local home directories so students are working on the local disk. They can upload their files to a network share when they are done, or store them in a USB3 or Thunderbolt drive if they don't use the same Mac every time. This is what we do and when some raw video files can be 20+GB it works much better than trying to run it over the network.

VPP Apps can only be assigned to a user or group, not a device because an Apple ID must be used to accept the invitation or redeem the code depending on what type of VPP license management you chose. Update: see http://help.apple.com/profilemanager/mac/3.0/#apd7FD061FD-D954-49E1-910D-75FF4FC47C76

You will want to use QoS or bandwidth shaping for your users or you could have a single user tie up the entire bandwidth. No one will be happy with that except the one hogging all the bandwidth.

You can use it to deploy App Store apps (VPP), but not pre-packaged apps. For those you will need to use Apple Remote Desktop, DeployStudio, Casper Suite, Munkiserver/Simian, FileWave, etc.

Sassoon Joiner, Bean, TuxPaint, Scratch, SeaShore, Typist, iBooks, iFlash, Scrivener.

You should take a look at StudentNet SSO (Studentnet | Make the Cloud Yours!), which can replace GADS and GAPS, as well as pulling student groups and classlists from school admin systems and automatically creating email groups in Google Apps. They are dynamically updated. It can also provide SSO for Zendesk and other systems. It can do all you want and more.

Yes, "\fileserver\users$\" would work fine, but "\fileserver\users$\Students\YearGroup\" would not because only "users$" is shared and not "YearGroup" - that is the problem the OP had.

I think the problem could be that you are referencing a share "users$" in the path of your home directory location, instead of sharing out the actual file path (e.g. \\fileserver\users\YearGroup\) you are trying to map. So, OSX stops at the only location that is actually shared "\fileserver\users$" - I doubt that would ever work. I haven't tried it, but can't see how it could work.

I would suggest using a file path like \\fileserver\Students\%username% - this will work just fine. I think you've gone from no organisation for student home accounts to an unnecessary level of organisation. If you are interested in scripting shares then try this out - Script to Map Network Shares on OSX (AFP or SMB) - Blogs - EduGeek.net Create the script as an App, install it on all of the Macs and set a trigger to have it run at login, and periodically if you want (every 30). This can all be done using AppleScript.

That server is not adequate for virtualisation. You're going to be running three Windows servers (host and two VMs) with only 8GB of RAM. Most laptops sport that amount of RAM these days. I would only consider virtualisation if you can bump the RAM up to 16GB or more and have a server that can backup and store the VMs. If you don't have backups of your VMs then you are more likely to have failures than with physical servers. Sometimes virtualisation software can have problems, either from upgrade issues or bugs (seen both), and these can sometimes cause your VMs to be unbootable. I've had it occur with 3 VMs over 5 years with vSphere (v4.0, 4.1, 5.0, 5.1, 5.5). Easy to fix if you took a backup before major upgrades, DIW if you didn't.

iBoss Pro. It doesn't have AD integration, but does have User login capability (iboss Pro Series Content Filter - User Login). Otherwise, the lowest spec iBoss Enterprise filter should set you back less than $1,000. Or, you could use Squid (w/ AD integration) and Dansguardian or Untangle perhaps. However, if you aren't a Linux/Open Source type then there aren't going to be too many good web filters with AD integration for much less than $1,000 or so.

Yes, but in this case the permissions problems are showing up on the local computer "/Applications" rather than SMB network shares. I don't believe hat is the problem in this case.

Haven't seen this one. There was an issue in 10.9.0 and 10.9.1 where ACL permissions on an SMB2 share could,be corrupted by a mavericks user viewing the ACL permissions on finder. But that was something quite different from this problem. I suspect there may be something such as Parallels for SCCM causing the problem. Either that or a process or script running at login for an AD user that is corrupting local permissions. There is likely a correlation between the corrupt permissions and domain user logins.

I would recommend Weebly. You can pay them $500 to do a custom site design for you.