martin_hannah

I'm looking for a way to remotely power on imacs through ARD, i'm working for a school that have 100 imacs tied into open and active directory controlled with ARD and WGM from their mac server. When i've tried it before through ARD it has told me that "lights out management" is required which I have discovered is only available on os x servers.. The windows boxes here start up fine with wake on LAN.. Any thoughts? Cheers, Martin

I know this is an old thread but I thought it could save me some time messing around if I can get a response from someone.. I've tried copying the Perian.prefpane to the machd->library->preferencepanes folder with ARD but it doesn't pick it up in sys preferences. I have a feeling that this isn't the only file that needs copying over but I can't find any preference files etc that might go with it when I manually install it on the test mac. I would also like to disable auto update on the clients but again don't know where the preference file is.. Any help/advice on deploying this would be greatly appreciated as i would like to push this round to the whole school. Many thanks, Martin - I've now managed to get it to show up in sys pref but it says that it is not installed.. I have also found the org.perian.perian.plist pref but don't know if this contains the setting to enable/disable auto updates..

A couple of strange font issues.. Set up is mac clients joined to OD and AD in "Magic Triangle" users are authenticating with AD. Students have been trying to install fonts to use with photoshop and indesign that they have downloaded from dafont. Typically .ttf files. When they try to install the font it seems like it's going to do it (quick flash of a progress bar) but it doesn't show up in Font Book. However if they browse to their home drive (Network Home)/Library/Fonts the font appears there.. and if they restart and log back in the font shows up in Font Book and works no problem.. The second problem is that in Word 08 it isn't possible to select a font properly (any font, Arial for Example) as it automatically selects a different font at random.. If you type in the font and press enter it's fine but it seems to have a problem with selecting the font with the mouse. I have only seen this on one machine so far but haven't been able to fix it.. Any ideas? Thanks in advance, Martin

Yes! Wish I had a script for that so I could push it out through ARD. M

Okay software update problem sorted! For some reason the osxserver had been taken out of the reverse lookup list on the DNS server?? Not sure how this happened but sorted now, all works a treat. Now I just need to figure out how I can instigate the updates automatically... And get to the bottom of the slowness issue.. still not sorted even after fixing the reverse lookup. Thanks, Martin

Still haven't got to the bottom of this one.. Still takes a long time to log in/out, i've also noticed that the classroom macs will occasionally freeze and beach ball for a couple of minutes before coming back to life. Even when just trying to open finder.. Thought i'd post up some more details; 172.22.8.11 is the primary DNS server, Domain Controller and AD server, 172.22.8.12 is the backup Domain Controller 172.22.8.14 is the backup DNS server 172.22.8.18 is the OD osxserver. Here's the responses from theses terminal commands on a client machine; nslookup osxserver.brcc.local Server: 172.22.8.11 Address: 172.22.8.11#53 Name: osxserver.brcc.local Address: 172.22.8.18 nslookup brcc.local Server: 172.22.8.11 Address: 172.22.8.11#53 Name: brcc.local Address: 172.22.8.12 Name: brcc.local Address: 172.22.8.14 Name: brcc.local Address: 172.22.8.11 dig brcc.local ; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> brcc.local ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 15792 ;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 3, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;brcc.local. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: brcc.local. 600 IN A 172.22.8.14 brcc.local. 600 IN A 172.22.8.11 brcc.local. 600 IN A 172.22.8.12 ;; Query time: 1 msec ;; SERVER: 172.22.8.11#53(172.22.8.11) ;; WHEN: Tue Jan 18 10:24:10 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 76 dig osxserver.brcc.local ; <<>> DiG 9.6.0-APPLE-P2 <<>> osxserver.brcc.local ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 525 ;; flags: qr aa rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;osxserver.brcc.local. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: osxserver.brcc.local. 3600 IN A 172.22.8.18 ;; Query time: 1 msec ;; SERVER: 172.22.8.11#53(172.22.8.11) ;; WHEN: Tue Jan 18 10:25:19 2011 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 54 Another thing I am trying to get set up is the software update service from the mac server, i've downloaded all of the updates (342) and they are all enabled. Software updates is providing updates on port 8088. In WGM I have told the clients to point to; "http://osxserver.brcc.local:8088/index-leopard-snowleopard.merged1.sucatalog" Once the clients refresh their preferences and try to update they get the error message; "The Software Update Server (osxserver.brcc.local) is not responding. Check to make sure your network connection is operating normally. If there are no issues with your connection, contact your network administrator for assistance." I've tried changing the port to 80, and 8888 and I still have the same problem. The clients are using a proxy but they are set up to bypass 172.* and *.local. In network utility these ports are open on the osxserver; Port Scanning host: 172.22.8.18 Open TCP Port: 22 ssh Open TCP Port: 88 kerberos Open TCP Port: 106 3com-tsmux Open TCP Port: 311 asip-webadmin Open TCP Port: 389 ldap Open TCP Port: 625 dec_dlm Open TCP Port: 3659 apple-sasl Open TCP Port: 4940 Open TCP Port: 5800 Open TCP Port: 5900 vnc-server Open TCP Port: 8088 radan-http It would be great if someone could some light on what might be stopping software update from connecting to the server? Thanks for all the replies, Martin

I solved this one by creating a symbolic link from ~/Movies to /tmp/@%/Movies - Means that their data is being stored locally but some of the students projects are 10GB plus so it's unrealistic backing all of that up to the network. It's been working okay though I recently ran into a problem where one students work wasn't saving.. fine for everyone else. Having a lot of other problems though so I'm thinking it will resolve itself once the other fires are put out. Seems like i'm not the only one with these problems... Here's my other post.

I'll need a bit of educating in this level of troubleshooting on the macs, think you could break the processes down for me? Would be really helpful, it's like i'm feeling my way around in the dark at the moment... I've tried using dig and nslookup commands on the domain controller before and everything comes back okay.. Yea I came across this issue before when binding them to AD, had to manually change their time so it was within a couple of minutes of the AD server. Is it best to use the mac OD server (pointing to the same upstream time server as the windows servers) as an NTP and point all of the clients macs to that? If so, how does one set that up? I don't have ARD so i'm hoping there's a WGM preference I can push out.. Wasn't this sorted in 10.6? I've tried adding .local to the search domains but it didn't make a different.. I haven't tried mydomain.local, i'll give this a go on my next visit. Forward and reverse lookups are all coming back fine, I'll post up my nslookup and dig results next time i'm there. Thanks for all the replies, i'm the only (kinda) mac guy at this school so I don't really have anyone on site to discuss these issues with.. Martin

Yea I have a feeling they might just have to get used to the speed, I just didn't want to give up straight away.. If only they had some kind of visual feedback on what they're doing on login/out I might be able to figure out whats slowing them up. I had found the directory status feature handy in the past so I used WGM to push out a policy to always display that on the login window. Staff have been told to wait till that's green before trying to login as I can take up 15/20 seconds to change. All the problematic clients have had network accounts available. Unfortunately the network home shares will be difficult to change as all of the students and teachers in AD are managed by another company and synced to their server, but i'll take it into consideration and maybe test it out with some dummy accounts and see if it makes a difference. Don't suppose you've got any links you could throw my way on this issue? Yea I never got imaging working over the network.. - 2 clients wouldn't bind to od and needed setting up from scratch, ended up just throwing in an OS disc. I will look into potential VLAN issues tomorrow but won't be able to do to much really as I can't config any of the switches.. I might try patching a client into the same VLAN as the server and see what happens. Many thanks, Martin

Additional info; Mac Mini running 10.6 server, clients all on 10.6. Server on seperate VLAN (read that this can cause issues, don't have an awful lot of control over this as they are cisco managed switches, all windows servers are also on that VLAN). Domain is .local DNS is set up and working forward and reverse lookup no problems. Cheers, Martin

I've recently installed a mac mini server into a secondary school as an open directory server for the management of around 60 macs that are authenticating through a windows AD server. I have set the clients up to Not force a local home directory on the startup disk so they all have Network Home folders. The first issue I ran into was with imovie 09, it wouldn't write to their network homes. I solved this by creating a symbolic link through the MCXRedirector in WGM and pointed their Movies folder to the local hard drive /tmp/%@/Movies and told the teachers that the students will need to use the same imac each lesson when using imovie. These are my remaining issues; 1 - The log in and log out time on the macs has at least tripled (between 1 and 2 minutes) since the open directory server has been installed and since they were not using network home folders (old setup). I have created more symbolic links to store cache files, log files, the application support folder locally but this seems to of made no difference to the speed. 2 - Students are occasionally and intermittently getting this error on login (never seen before on old set up) "You are unable to log in to the user account *username* at this time. Loggin into the account failed because an error occurred." I fixed this by restarting the clients but it's happening to 1-3 students in each class. I could also log in as a network admin even before restarting the client so seems like it could be a user problem rather than computer however restarting resolved the problem.. I've seen some really helpful posts on this forum regarding this particular setup but despite having a good search through I couldn't find any concrete answers for these problems.. Help is always appreciated, Many thanks, Martin