jwpercival

Interesting to note that Porchester School used AppMakr :: iPhone App Maker | Make your own iPhone App | Free iPhone App Maker which used their existing RSS feeds, podcasts and Flickr account.

It would be worth taking a look at Dash Code, part of the Developer Tools. You can use it to create a Web App for all of your SLT and then you won't have to worry about signing it or distributing it to all of the members of staff, they can just add it the link to their home screen. It'll also be easier for you to update the app or you could link it to a data source. I'm personally a big fan of using RSS and ATOM feeds to distribute information rather than having to dip into a single source. I use Flipboard on the iPad which aggregates all of my data feeds using Google Reader as well as social networking such as Twitter.

It would be well worth watching this video from the ACU ConnectEd Summit where Frasier Spears talks about his experience with iPad. YouTube - Fraser Speirs: The End of the IT Department? He also has an interesting blog which is worth a read too: Fraser Speirs - Blog We offer a free iPad loan programme if you want to borrow one. My contact details are in the signature below.

Make sure you click on "Edit..." for the Computer Name in Sharing preferences as well and ensure that the correct name is listed in there. It could be that the Mac is pulling the name from your DHCP server so take a look at that and remove any entries in there for that name / IP address.

Hi Andrew, If you hold down the Option / Alt key as soon as the Mac is turned on you should be able to choose the partition you want to boot from. If you choose the Windows partition and then hold down F8 you should be able to get to grips with the Windows issues either with a Safe Boot or going straight to the command line. If you have a bootable Windows disk that'll show up too when you hold down the Option key at startup. Good luck!

Hi Rich, You could run FTP over TCP/IP with a server running on one platform and a client on the other to transfer the files. FTP should cope with the long file names. Alternatively you could use a Mac client to connect to the Windows servers via SAMBA to perform the data migration. Hope that helps!

This should do the trick and stop the Mac from locking the shares. Let me know how you get on! Open the Terminal in /Applications/Utilities when you're logged in as a local administrator. Copy and paste this line into Terminal: sudo open -a /Applications/TextEdit.app /etc/auto_master It'll then ask you to type in the admin password. Finally, in the document that opens stick a # (Alt + 3) in front of the line /Network/Servers -fstab so it should now look like this: # /Network/Servers -fstab Make sure you do it on a Mac that you're not fussed about going wrong, just in case it causes any issues.

I'm pretty sure this will be down to how the share that the home folders are stored on is setup. Given that the first login works fine the Mac will be authenticating against the share and then it will be locked and in use for that session using those credentials. It could be that, in testing you are logging in and out so rapidly that the Windows server doesn't get a chance to release the share before you next attempt to login. Usually there will be at least a couple of minutes before another student sits at the Mac to login at the start of a lesson. You may find if you restart the Mac rather than logging out it will release the share, although this isn't really a solution. How are you sharing the home folders from your Windows Server?

Another really neat trick: If you hold down the menu button on an Apple remote during boot (assuming the Mac has an IR receiver which most do) it will display all bootable volumes and let you choose the boot disk using the left and right buttons on the remote.

BootPicker is free too. rEFIt is a good solution as well and provides a boot choice before Mac OS boots at all, whereas BootPicker pretty much boots Mac OS and then reboots if another OS is chosen. BootPicker's interface is a bit more elegant though and can be left on display whereas (I think) rEFIt has to have an OS choice within a certain timeframe.

If you're using a Mac in a school environment then it is quite neat to use BootPicker which presents the user with a graphical option to choose their OS. Best of all, its free: Apple - Education - IT Professionals - BootPicker

Have you set a firmware password on the Mac? If a firmware password is set then it prevents booting from a different disk unless you boot into the open firmware and enter the password first. Another possibility is, if it is an older Mac such as a white iMac, then it will not necessarily work with a new keyboard. Hope that helps...

Macs pretty much hate a .local domain so good to hear you are implementing a new domain for all of your clients. Your OD server is capable of much more such as managed preferences for all of your Mac users, centralised software updates for your Macs and, one of my personal favourites, wiki server: Apple - Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard - Wiki Server Windows can do policy control for the Macs, but it involves some costly software plugins to augment your MX records. I much prefer binding the Mac clients into both the Windows AD for authentication and the Mac OD for policy management. Binding the Mac server into your AD will also allow you to create OD groups to contain your AD groups for easy and effective management. There is a bunch of really useful videos here with details: Apple (United Kingdom) - Education - Resources - Information Technology Cheers, John

File Sharing for iPad looks really interesting and finally answers the question that so many have when using the devices with multiple users! Looking at the screen shots it does seem to be part of the standard OS which will be interesting. When Thunderbolt reaches other Macs, such as the Mac mini server, you could use an adapter to utilise the port for ethernet giving you two Gb ethernet ports.

There are usually Kerberos issues that arise if you initially set your Mac server up as an OD master or connect to the AD (or any other directory service) during the installation process. I always install the Mac server as standalone providing DNS and router (default gateway) information during the install process. Once the server has been set up, then use the built in Active Directory plugin in Directory Utility to bind the Mac server into your Windows Server. This will kerberize the Mac. Finally, when this is complete, promote your standalone server to an Open Directory master. If that is the process you followed then you may have a DNS issue. Ensure that the Mac server has forward and reverse lookups in your DNS and that there isn't a previous entry still listed.

Hi Ranj, There is now only a free version of Carbon Copy Cloner and it works brilliantly. I know a number of schools who use it with the built in scheduler to create a bootable backup of their server. Donations to the developer are, of course, gladly accepted I'm sure. Cheers, John