nonmonotonic

How are you connecting to the TV?

Is your Mac bound to AD?

Are you printing via windows print server? If so is print services for UNIX enabled?

What OS? Lion uses 'Apple' SAMBA as opposed to the open source version in Snow Leopard.

Macs phone home a lot! Its trying to sync some app or service. Get yourself Little Snitch and it will pinpoint the offending app.

When you say 'open relatively small documents', would these be Word documents? If so your problem is not directly with the server connection but with the way Microsoft needs to too and fro in the Word application. I had an issue with trying to open Powerpoint docs in home directories on a slow wired network. It could take up to 30 minutes to load a Powerpoint presentation with lots of photos. You need to look into local caching to prevent this excessive polling of the network (I just got a faster network, which is not an option in your case).

That is correct but thats not the same a wake on lan. No remote system will power up a machine thats completely switched off. WoL is tied into power management and is triggered through network card. WoL is incorperated into ARD however I also use a simple stand alone app. I restart and wake Macs remotely via ARD but to power up from off, as you said, I have to physicaly touch the machine. I believe lights out management is specific to xServe . Management is via a second network port which has its own IP address. Automatic startup/shutdown can be done through energy saver section of system prefs. under schedule. Do none of these solve your problem?

The reason that you cant remote manage is probably because its not switched on! Go to sharing in system preferences (client mac). Tick the remote management box and which enables the remote manage button (pic1). Check out the options under computer settings. When you tick the box you will get a list of options that you can enable (pic2). I have all mine enabled on all my client Macs. Lights out management is for servers and is different from VNC ( which ARD is )

In ARD go to view menu --> customize toolbar and drag whatever button you want to the toolbar (restart/shut down is not there by default). see pic.

Oidentd (or here) works on all flavours of BSD. Wonder if it ports to OS X?

Not quite sure what you are trying to achieve. If it is to prevent the uninstallers for each Adobe product running you are wasting your time. To run an installer/uninstaller on a Mac, you must be an administrator or a user with admin rights (hence no viruses on Macs) .

WineBottler: Old Wine in new bottles? Could be single application answer. Bank of Ireland had to reconfigure their webpage to cater for Safari (its an ActiveX thing). I believe their business users had problems using a Mac for the same reason.

You can view the log files by using the Console app. (utilities folder). Open up the left hand side column which shows the various logs. Logs are timestamped so look for the time the error occurred. You can check logs on the errant Mac and/or the Mac server.

I know exactly what you are getting at. I have had similar problems. Plus the fact that the new Lion Macs wont run from your Snow Leopard images to get you out temporarily. I had lots of fun with having two OS'es on campus. I had 10.4 and 10.5 running and using the 10.4 Macs would break the students profile in 10.5.

Sorry misread your post. When you have your 'gold' Mac setup in target mode, create a disk image of it by using Disk Utility on a firewire connected second Mac. With this image which you can clone the other Macs. How were you thinking of doing that?

Are you keeping the 'T' key pressed until you see the firewire logo on the screen?

No reason why you cant. ( sorry, couldn't resist ) Cloning is not the problem, it is licensing. You will have the same license on each Mac. For this type of install you would be better to create a package and install that way (have you ARD?). PackageMaker and Iceberg are both free. Check out snapshot package option. Packaging is the way software distribution is going. Here is some info on it. DeployStudio can also use packages. Finally, this gives an idea of unattended install for Acrobat Pro

Forgot to mention that Crossover is a commercial version of Wine.

A lot of work for one application. Why not try Crossover? You dont need to install Windows but I suggest a trial first because its not 100% compatible.

This has been discussed before and here is my suggestion. Interesting stuff from the NTP people themselves. I'm in a mixed Mac/PC environment and have no problems syncing to our Windows Domain Controller (NTP server). Tick set time & date automatically in preferences and point to your NTP server. I do use the IP address not the server name.

This has been discussed before and here is my suggestion. Interesting stuff from the NTP people themselves. I'm in a mixed Mac/PC environment and have no problems syncing to our Windows Domain Controller (NTP server). Tick set time & date automatically in preferences and point to your NTP server I do use the IP address not the name.

The shutting down fix would point to time difference. Is your Mac synced to a NTP ( time ) server?

Nick, are they burning local or network data? Any burning using network folders or remote data is bound to fail. Put all data on local hard drive and burn directly.

Thank you for the link ( so good you named it twice! ). Should be Netdom

Squid proxy plus LightSquid ?