Zoatibix

Hello, We're rebuilding one of our music classrooms. Currently we use Parallels to reimage them, then have it push out Pro Logic and it's sample libraries. However, it seems that the new version of PLX wants to store the samples into the library of the person who installed the software, rather than a central common library location. Have we missed an option within Logic to change that behaviour? If not, is there a way around it? Thank you in advance. David Morgan

Hello, A colleague and I are trying to work out how to set our Macs to take each user to our College's homepage. Despite a fair amount of head scratching we can't work out how to do this. At the moment we have Parallels (so we're using a mix of Profiles and scripts pushed to machines via AD groups.) However, we're migrating to Intune / Apple School Manager...we assumed the latter would have some settings for this kind of thing... If somebody can point us in the right direction we'd be most grateful. Thank you.

I've avoided any spoilers but I'm personally betting that given her plot arch and character development we could end up with Queen Sansa. Or the writers pull a Blackadder Goes Forth finale...everybody dies...and some leftfielder takes over...OMG...they could do that exact ending with the Faceless Man....

I loved the movie and thought they did a good job of tying up most of it. It wasn't all just put back the way it was. there were losses, sacrifices that had lasting consequences, etc. I did find the 'We got your back girl' bit with Captain Marvel a bit cringy...just seemed unnecessarily forced. Just have the womenfolk beating crap up like the menfolk. I am curious as to how Falcon is able to be the new Captain America? Steve was given the super-serum, so is superhuman. But isn't Falcon just a regular guy in a suit a la Tony Stark?

The undead dragon did use his breath to knock great chunks out of The Wall last season. I wasn't sure if that was because he breathed magic blue but still hot fire or magically cold fire...still seemed a little strange. But this week, the dragon has obviously levelled up and put all his points into Concussive Blast Breath Weapon Trait. What I find particularly bad is that - as others have said - we've gone from characters moving the plot forward in the earlier seasons to plot-driven characters in the final one. It's a very jarring change. For example, Jon 'I don't want to be king' Snow going around telling folks he's the rightful king* which seems to me to be exactly the opposite of what he should be doing, if that's what he wants. Shut yer trap, Jon. Swear the other two to secrecy and spare a lot of unnecessary death. You know, like Eddard Stark did to protect you, his sister's baby. So many characters this season are just turning their back on all of the hard-won lessons they've learned over the previous seven series. *Although, this is seems like a pre-medieval multiple claims by birth, plus force of arms, etc situation. So I don't think Dany has a clear claim anymore than Jon or Gendry.

Right, I appear to have figured this out. Partly a typo on my side of things. I’d tried enabling the LPD service on both the local and central print servers but alas it did not help. I did a comparison the entries in CUPS for the working and non-working versions of the printer. I noticed that CUPS displayed the printers a little differently but also there were two key differences in Setup. 1. The working setup uses SMB:// instead of LPD:// 2. The queue was missing ‘PS’ at the end of the queue name. D’oh! I’ve amended the script as shown and tested with a couple of different accounts. #!/bin/bash lpadmin -p PS-B-FollowYouMonoPS -L "" -E -v smb://ps-b.mydomain/FollowYouMonoPS -P "/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/RICOH MP C3004ex" exit Jobs are now releasing as they should from the printers when users request them! So that is now working. However, I’m not sure if the PaperCut Client on the macs is working as it should. It displays and updates the users balance, it gives a warning that the job is held in a queue and needs to be authorised. But when I first send a job to print on a particular machine I get prompted to enter my network credentials (although I can add them to my keychain). Is this intended behaviour? I thought it was meant to transparently pass the credentials through. Lastly, as a quality of life thing, is there a way of telling the Macs that ‘Internal Tray 2’ is installed? It’s where our A3 paper sits but I can’t find a way of setting that other than each user manually setting it.

Hello, No - our VLANing is set up so that folks can't see the printers directly. I can add the Virtual Print Queue by hand on each iMac and can print successfully. Thank you.

I had a bunch of older iMacs running ElCap. We had to upgrade to High Sierra to run some particular software in those classrooms. That broke their ability to get network time. Reading into the topic, I believe that Apple disabled the old NTPD service and created Pacemaker (I think in Sierra?). Mojave machines use Timed instead of Pacemaker and have had no issue at all. For the High Sierra machines I fixed it by following a suggestion to set the file controlling NTPD on start up to 'enabled' and putting it back into the startup files. Previously we had issues with networked Macs losing time if they go to sleep.

Hello, We have recently replaced our Xerox printers with shiny new Ricoh ones. Each campus now has it's own pair of virtual printer queues (one for Mono, one for Colour). I'm trying to use SCCM with Parallels to remove the existing printers, install the print driver and then map the print queues. I've set up a Task Sequence that just affects machines based on their OU in AD. Step 1 - removing old printers works. Step 2 - install the newest Ricoh drivers package seems to work okay, too. (If I later remove the dodgy printers and simply re-add them I can print okay.) Step 3 - I'm using this code to install the printers: lpadmin -p PS-B-FollowYouColourPS -L "" -E -v lpd://PS-B.ourdomain/FollowYou -P "/Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/RICOH MP C3004ex" (I then run a second line to set the Mono queue.) The printer does appear but if send a job from a MAC it doesn't show up on the printer. I think that's because I'm not installing the virtual printer queue (I've noted that the printers installed by this method lack "Virtual campus" under the printer's location. I've tried pushing a profile to the mac with the printer instead but unfortunately, that isn't working either. Questions: 1. Can I map a virtual print queue with a script like this? 2. If not, how can I do this? Thank you in advance.

Hello. No, we set the profile in AD as \\fileservername\staff\fred.bloggs for example. I know we have issues with Macs and the ADFS shares that our Windows users have, so our mac using students are flagged by course code to have their home drives mapped as above.

I've realised that enabling mobile accounts works correctly if I enable the option as part of the initial 'bind to domain' step when imaging the machine.

Hello, A while back I had issues with AD Domain bound macs - when I ticked the lovely 'Create Mobile Accounts' box it would somehow corrupt their binding - users couldn't log on and I'd have to droped the machine off the domain and then rebind. Then I realised I could set that up as a set in DeployStudio as part of the imaging process. They would bind and mobile accounts would work without issue. Now, however, we've moved over to Parallels and are installing High Sierra and we're getting the same problem. Is there a proper procedure I should be following to get this working? Thank you. Zoatibix

We had an email forwarded to us via JANET. JANET have confirmed that they are getting IP connections between our server's external IP and a botnet server. While I can see pgsql in that folder, I don't see MySQL. Update: Malwarebytes didn't turn up anything. SCEP is still running. Thank you. Zoatibix

Hello, Server version is 5.6.1 OS X is High Sierra 10.13.5 (updated on 13th June) I'd got SCEP installed but I'm installing and running Malwarebytes now. Thank you. Zoatibix

Hello, We've been notified that our mac server may have been compromised by some form of botnet, possibly a .."vulnerable Drupal CMS Version https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/drupal-rce-exploit-code.html" The only web stuff we have running on our MAC server is the basic website to run Profile Manager and Enroll Devices. We do have an alias set on our Firewall as we have been trying to set up DEP and remote locking of our MacBooks. Questions: 1. As I haven't installed Drupal, Apache, etc where and what should I be looking to patch? 2. What would be the best way of cleaning up the server after the patch is applied? Thank you. Zoatibix

I think so, we're currently trialling Parallels. That does a 'better job' of managing MACs through SCCM but much of what it does I can already do via Deploy Studio / Profile Manager. The main thrust of that is to enable the remote deployment of software to MAC suites rather than rely on Deploy Studio workflows and/or Apple Remote Desktop (I'm told the latter can be a bit flaky pushing out software. Not sure if that has been addressed.) I'm hesitant to suggest to my boss that we purchase somethign else if it's just a misconfiguration on our end, of course. Thanks for the reply.

Hello, We have ten macbook airs that students can remove from a locker by swiping their ID Badges. They can then use the MBA to do coursework, etc then return it to the locker. I've been trying to set our systems up to let me remotely lock and/or wipe the MBAs. However, while this works fine within the campus it doesn't work off site (I took one home to test.) Looking on our Mac Server there are no services available over the internet. Am I right in suspecting this might be related? I've got a third-party certificate set up. along with an external IP address and an entry on our Firewall which should pass connections through to the Mac Server. (We're in a similar position with DEP, btw.) Another thing I'd like to do is set a firmware password. I've tried doing this as part of the workflow in Deploy Studio but was getting the 'Folder of Denial' when the MBAs first rebooted. I removed the firmware password, let the machine finish the Deploy Studio install and get it a good luck reboot. Some of the macs are still giving the folder error. If anybody can suggest a fix for one or both of these problems I'd be very grateful. Thank you. Zoatibix

We had a similar issue at our place. To be frank I think there's a problem with our network setup but I've never managed to get a decent answer as to what that might be. However, after several months of trial and error I got a dim understanding of the problem from the Mac's point of view and managed to come up with a fix. I orginally thought that time was the big issue, so set the time to update from time.ourdomain.ac.uk. That improved things a bit. Unfortunately, Macs were still randomly losing the ability to see the domain. If I logged in locally I could see they were getting an IP address but the domain name was now displaying as 'MYDOMAIN' rather than 'mydomain.ac.uk'. I believe this is a symptom rather than a cause. I stopped using the Directory Utility, or entering the FQDN when trying to bind the Macs. Instead I used the IP address of the nearest DC, or the PDC in the 'Server' box under Users & Groups. This made a significant improvement but I honestly don't know why. I suspect a DNS/DHCP issue but an outside consultant that looked into the problem couldn't pinpoint any causes. Still, things got a lot better but machines still went AWOL with annoying regularity. Blind luck one day I stumbled upon Keychain access > preferences > and ticked "Search Directory services for certificates." That seemed to be the clincher. When I used all three of those steps the problem pretty much went away. The macs don't 'fall off' the domain anymore frequently than the Windows machines we have.

Ah, okay. I'll give that a try. Thank you. :0)

Hello, I've dragged our MacMini Server out of mothballs, updated both the OS and Server. I've gone through the set up of DeployStudio on the server configuring the repository, shares, etc. All looks good. I've then wiped a MacBook, updated to latest OS and stuck it on a network cable. From that machine I've made a netboot set which I've then placed onto the server in the good ol' SP0 folder. Even placing the two machines onto the same switch, I can't get netboot to work. I get the flashing globe but then it gives up and goes to booting from disk. I would be very grateful for any advice on fixing this. Thank you.

Hello, I'm having a bit of an issue with our Macbooks (El C') and network logons over WiFi. I want users to be able to join the College's Wifi by using their network credentials at the MacBook's logon screen to authenticate to the WiFi Network. We have a Windows domain and are using Xirrus Arrays. The Windows-based laptops have the password for the SSID added to them as part of the imaging process. I've tried using Configurator2 (and then Profile Manager on the MAC Server) to create a Wifi profile that has the password for the SSID but I can only do that with the WPA2 - Personal settings. I think I need to use WPA2 Enterprise in order to have the "Use as a Login Window configuration" option available as this gives me a yellow dot and 'Network Login is required' Looking at our wifi arrays we are only running with a PSK and AES (although using 802.1) That doesn't match any of the available protocols that I can set up in the payload. Would I also need to get a certificate from a Certificate Authority for the 'Trust' part of the set up? I've tried using the public certificates from our Windows DC and from Apple but neither works. Am I missing something blindingly obvious? Thank you.

Hello, Having an issue with the above. The target servers are running a mixture of OSes - Server 2008 to Server 2012 R2. The data itself is being backed up without issue. However, the BMRs are always failing claiming that there is insufficient space (the drives are generally two-thirds full but according to MS they should only need around 1GB free) I've tried manual VSS copies to a network share which completes successfully but I still get the error. I have been reading that this error can be caused by a lack of space in the System Reserved partition...but the solution indicated is to use a third party disk repartitioning tool to increase the size of that partition. Something I'm not willing to try on a production server I can't get a good BMR/VSS back up on unless I have another choice. Anybody come across this kind of thing before? Thank you.

@alphatec: Thanks for the suggestion: I tried steps one and two - we don't have a MAC server up at the moment to run the Profile Manager. Oddly, I've again tried joining the MACs to both our old domain (which is still Server 2003 at it's heart) and the new domain simultaneously. That will work and I can authenticate with credentials from either domain. And if I remove the old domain binding I can still authenticate to the new domain. (I actually powered the iMac off for half an hour) I will see if the settings still work over night.

Thanks for the replies. I've checked that the time matches our local network time - all fine. Not sure where you mean I need to go when you say the 'sharing name'. I've made sure that I've used e.g. imac99 as the computer's name in both for NetBIOS in Network settings and as it's computer ID under Directory Utility. However, I tried joining this test iMac to our old domain (we are migrating from one to the other). This works fine and after a reboot I can authenticate to the old domain. If I log on locally both domains are still listed - and if I remove the old domain and reboot the iMac retains the settings for the new domain and lets me logon to the network. I'm guessing there is either something extra on the old domain side or something lacking on the new...just have to figure out what. Thank you for your replies so far, folks.

Hello, We just took delivery of forty brand new iMacs. All hardwired into our network. I have gone through the initial set up and successfully joined them to our Domain. They pickup the DNS servers, gateway, identifies the domain, grabs a free IP address from DHCP. I can then log into them using my network account which authenticates to the domain server. Until I either reboot or it goes to sleep...at which point I get a message that 'network accounts are unavailable'. If I log on locally I can see that all the settings are still there. However, there is a message that ''The server is not in your authentication search policy.' despite the mocking green light next to our domain name Oddly, when I look in DNCP I see that the iMac has a name of 'MACS-iMac' rather than e.g. 'b-imac-40'. The latter also shows up as its NETBIOS name. At one point I pinged its IP and got a response from 'windows phone.' As soon as I pulled the network cable the ping responses stopped. I've tried the following: reserving it's chosen IP address in DHCP. (Tried also giving it the name it came up with.) Unbinding and rebinding. Giving it a completely different name. Setting it to look for our primary DC Giving it a completely different name. Setting all other network connections to inactive and putting Ethernet at the top of that list. At that point it grabs an IP address, etc I've unticked 'Allow authentication from any domain in the forest' (We currently have two domains but the test machine shouldn't be crossing any boundaries logically or physically) Should I be binding it to the domain first and then changing settings or what? We do have Lightspeed here but oddly only a few of the MACs seem to be being blocked by it and they just need network authentication. Any ideas gratefully received!