Carter

Very frustrating! Being asked to see what solutions are out there but right now all we can do is wait for MS to update OD. Yes macOS Clients are a smaller percentage of the computer population but none the less still a large part.

Not sure if this well help or not but this is the setup I use for pushing a default profile. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mac/72443-how-create-os-x-default-profile-template-bind-ad-10-5-10-8-a.html

We have a contract with MS to encompass all of our activations with MS Office but with the new setup of "Click To Run" we're having the issue that when a student logs in it's using up a license/seat from their own account rather than the college account. Also if that first user that logged into the machine logs out then another user logs into that very computer Office will be activate from the first student user that was logged in. This means that if that first student has 5 activations they will use them all up just by logging into college machines as it seems to stick to those computers. Also what if a student has already activated their five seats at home? Will they not be able to use Office at all anymore on site at the college? Anyway the team here ran into this curve ball this morning and any insight on how other Enterprise/Education settings are handling "Click to run" would be great. Thank you!

I wonder if the default user profile was somehow adjusted on the Mac itself. The default user profile is found at /System/Library/User Template/English

It's ridiculous. The college here is pushing hard to get rid of network drives in favour for OneDrive, heck we have a college wide meeting today with Techs about this one subject and all I can bring to the table is "Microsoft ain't do'n nut'n for the Macs, sorry, no files on demand for Macs at all!".

Fully agree! Issue we will have is that all users have home network drives based on Active Directory but over the last year we've been testing OneDrive and now over this coming year they want to look at phasing out Network drives in favour for One Drive but as usual, the Mac users will be left in the cold. The only option I see is to tell all students that you will have to have an external HD/device and that's the only way you can work on large files. Feels like a step back but with onedrive being the way it is they're not giving us much of an option.

For our Windows environment we have the OneDrive Sync Client setup to only pull down files on request. So if a user has 50GB of used OneDrive space it's not completely synced to the computer. For the Macs this is not an option. Once a user logs into OneDrive for the first time all files/folders are synced to download unless the end user goes into preferences and deselects everything. Back 2-3 years ago when OneDrive was still new you could use a WebDAV link that would allow us to mount a drive through "Connect to Server" but this is no longer an option. What work arounds have people done with O365 in Enterprise on Mac so Staff, Students etc. can access their files without full sync or the need to open a browser just to download the needed files then manually uploading them once done?

At my college we've been running Bit Defender for the past three years with our contract ending this summer so I'm looking into Bit Defender again but I've been looking into alternatives. One alternative that I've been reading up on is Malwarebytes Endpoint. Has anyone tried Malwarebytes?

I need to push out a rather large folder with files in it to a lab and figured maybe a package deployment would work best. ARD would not push the folder out or a zip of it. Guessing the 9GB folder is too large as it keep stalling and canceling itself. Anyways if I can create a package I can get Munki to install it for me but so far I'm not having any luck understanding how to use the package utilities I've found. They seem to be configured the way they need to but do not compile correctly. Anyways the short of it is that I have one folder with a bunch of files in it that needs to be copied to the root of the hard Drive. What is the easiest way to create a package to do this? Thank you

I haven't updated the article but use this script instead https://github.com/amsysuk/public_scripts/blob/master/mount_SMBHome/mounthome.sh I have this script in place now with adjustments made to connect to our shares and drives. I'm still having it launch on login via a LaunchAgent.

Just uploaded an update here Downloads Use the one called "OS X 10.11 El Capitan - Default User Profile with Profile Backup". This one will create a backup of your profile before it deletes and re applies a new one. It will be found beside the default user profile folder at /System/Library/User Template/ If you're getting that error, are you creating your profile under an account called "Administrator" or is it named something else? If you have a different name you just need to open Automator and adjust the task that has this line. Also keep in mind for new images with OS X Yosemite 10.10+ you will have an issue with the Finder Sidebar Favorites. I covered this here OS X Finder Sidebar Favourites Missing or Permission Issue

We're having issues popping up where Adobe is no longer licensed and the script we have in place is not serializing the computers. When I use the package tool I see they have releases for 2015.3, 2015.5 etc. which are also known as 2016 versions which can mess with serialization. We are waiting to checkin with some of the users with these issues to have a better look and confirm application versions. I wish Adobe would stick to a suite name instead of just pushing updates. For those that have a subscription it isn't a big deal, but for those that run a volume license it's a pain in the butt.

macOS Sierra has been pretty solid with Beta 1 and so far beta 2. iOS10 was a little buggy with Beta 1 so I wouldn't recommend that one but so far Beta 2 has been much better.

iOS 10 and macOS Sierra Public Beta has been release. This means you can download and install the software without the need of being a registered developer. Of course keep in mind this is for testing and make backups if you chose to try it out. I have an article here if you want to make a bootable macOS Sierra USB installer http://twistedmac.com/index.php/22-mac-os/42-create-macos-sierra-usb-installer Public Beta Program is found here https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/ http://i.imgur.com/Ysck0mV.png

As usual login into https://developer.apple.com/download to get your betas. For iOS I'd sugest download Beta 2 and restore from scratch (do a back of the device first). As for macOS it's available as a update though App Store Updates or go ahead and download the full beta install.

Run OS updates. I had this issue with Ricoh printers. Though the drivers were in the image there were new updates that prevented the printers from printing. All jobs would just get paused.

With our Macs that are bound to AD the users cannot change the password locally. When they try to we get the message seen below. Users go to a password reset webpage the college has in place. As long as the Mac is connected to the network the password would sync. The best case is for the user to logout of the computer and back in to make sure the password syncs. Also as for the keychain the user will get a prompt to verify the person is who they are. They will need to provide the previous password to the sync the new password with the keychain. One issue I have is that Mac users tend to rarely logoff their laptops. So when they change their password for the college and they are not plugged into the network with their laptop and don't do so for a good while then it can cause an issue. The issue normally is that when they finally get around to plugging into the network and doing a restart or logout/in and it asks for their previous password they have forgotten it which causes an issue with the keychain. http://i.imgur.com/w9KV22v.png

Yup!

I've done up a document on how to create a bootable macOS Sierra 10.12 Developer Preview USB installer here How to create a bootable macOS Sierra USB installer

People also used to call it Mac OS "x" when it's really Mac OS "Ten"

So far I've completed an iOS update to iOS 10 on my iPhone 6. I went with the Certificate Profile to do the update OTA & worked fine. With iOS 10 you can downgrade to iOS 9 if you need to. I should have macOS Preview fully downloaded shortly and I'll soon install.

*** As with all Betas only install on a non production device and computer that you're not concerned about & make backups! *** Once you get logged into http://developer.apple.com/download you can download your preferred OS. The macOS 10.12 Developer Preview supports the following Macs: • MacBook, iMac: Late 2009 or newer • MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, Mac Pro: 2010 or newer

Sorry for the long post! Don't get me wrong, sysprep is a great tool but in our environment it makes for more of a mess than it's worth. I work for a college and we use sysprep with WDS and it's great but I also volunteer with Skills Canada. For those that live else where in the world you would have a similar non for profit skills competition like Skills US, Skills Germany etc. that's held once a year with it being in a different province, state etc. each year. As it's world wide for each country there's also World Skills competitions that are held every two years with the winning contestants from each country competing for World Skills Gold. Anyways back to what our team does. We're just volunteers so basically we arrive days before the event and I would be in charge to build 10-14 PC & Mac images from the ground up. (Mac building and deployment dirt simple with Deploy Studio) but ya each image could be on different hardware but the image is built on the hardware the competition would be using. With such a short time frame I try to get all required software installed and configured and setup so that we can just image it to a image laptop that we would then take to the setup and image the competition computers. With such a short timeframe I can't be sitting there dealing with setting up sysprep. We don't worry about drivers since they are in the image, naming is of no concern and we don't bind to any domain services since they are contained within their own individual network. They are imaged and only used for two days then all competitions are broke down. Unless we configure sysprep for each laptop image station we would have driver issues and other changes made that we don't want. Because each competition is isolated to itself we normally quickly make a laptop for that competition a decorated image server but these are made quick so we can get running. I like the idea of Fog but I had no luck when I was testing it and also tried CloneDeploy with the same result. We used CloneZilla last year and had issues so we went to a mix of SmartDeploy and CloneZilla this year. This year because we ran into the issue of partition sizes with CloneZilla (source being a larger HD than target) and we couldn't resolve this quick we then used Smart Deploy and saved our butts. Anyways that's the long story but that's why I'd like to look into a image deployment method without sysprep.

I've used ghost years ago and for our competitions here we need a solution to create an image and deploy over the network. We need a solution that does not require sysprep which rules out SmartDeploy & WDS. For our situation we need to simply image and restore computers. Sysprep is more of an issue than a benefit for us.

Have a look at this "Repairing Bootcamp partition" https://kb.paragon-software.com/article/169