mactech03

Hi All, Does anyone know how to redirect a network users cache and prefrences for apps such as firefox? Please Help! Mactech03

DMcCoy, I got a call today and finally got more info from my assistant. As it turns out everything is not working all the way. The main problem seems to be random and may be a part of what you have described as the cache folder needing to be redirected. It is completely random. You login as a student and save a file, logout, then try to log back in and you have to wait 5-10 minutes before the student can login again. By the way any help on how to redirect the cache folder would be appreciated. Thank You, Mactech03

Kingswood, I must have a skewed view on how the replica server works. I guess I thought that as soon as the main server went down it automagically failed over to the replica server (am i wrong?). I noticed that you said after your main server gets back up and going that you have to demote the replica and repromote your main server. My main goal is to have something in place when the hits the fan (a.k.a short term network problems). What do most people do in these situations besides a replica? Also does the replica have all of the users data avail? I know im asking you alot of questions that I should probably have the answers to but Im just trying to research the best route to take. -Mactech03

Books are great and the ones suggested by kingswood are awesome. The only time where the books arent so great are if you are in a hurry and have a large scale deployment. I was under a tight time line to get a 10.5 server deployed (unfortunately) and if it had not been for the awesome training I got from an apple certified trainer then I would have been left scratching my head on some stuff (such as weird flaky bugs in the first 10.5 server install dvds). It literally saved me a ton of wasted time trying to fix the unfixable and it also came in handy when it came time to deploy ical server, ichat server, and mail server especially. There are some things that Apple (doesnt support) such as squirrel mail and the trainers (at least the good ones know their way around the squirrel mail config files). Also a great resource that I wish I had explored more is on Apples website and it's free (lots of good stuff). It literally is the perfect companion to the apple essential 10.5 server book. Check Out Apple - Mac OS X Server - Resources Mac OS X Server Documentation Updates Good Look, Mactech03

Hi All, I learned from a near catastrophic incident (imagine about 150 teachers yelling at you about not being able to login) that I am going to require a 10.5 replica server. Currently I dont have one in place, from what I understand it only replicates the user login info but none of the user data. Has anyone set a replica 10.5 server up? If so how do you get to both their accounts and data if the other server should fail? Any suggestions would be welcome. Thank You, Mactech03

Thanks for the reply, I will say it is odd and im not totally convinced but the problem seems to have magically resolved its self, the building that said it was having issues had a max login time of 30 seconds (network user) with the exception of a few computers that are early g4 era. I did take an imac from the working lab and plugged it up at a building that was having issues and guess what? there were no problems at all! And the computers that teachers were complaining about were totally fine. Thank you for your help and assistance, Its been crazy lately. Old equipment is starting to finally fail and its keeping me fairly busy so my brain is about toasted and its good to have a second brain (edugeek users rox) -Mactech03

Hey all, Well it seems ive gotten a bit over my head. I have an xserve (early 08) with 3 750gb sas drives in a raid 5 4 gb of ram. This server is used to login students and teachers (roughly 500 users although probably only about 90 login at once). Im experiencing odd speed issues although 1 lab seems to work great for some reason and having a hard time figuring out what to look for on the server as far as what could be causing the slowness issues. All users are network account users and with the exception of the 1 lab that works fine it takes 3-4 minutes to login. The server is currently running os 10.5.5. Any help or pointing me in the right direction would be appreciated. -Mactech03

When you login as local admin can you ping the server or get on the internet? Also check and make sure no one has messed with dns on that computer. Good Luck.

I need help figuring out a way to get local address books to show up in webmail. Any Ideas?

(as stated below) use nt offline password editor (Ultimate Boot CD - Overview), I have noticed for some strange reason that it may take a few tries to reset a password, but it works very well.

Sounds pretty bad, I had a similar issue not too long ago. After hours of speaking with dell it was found that the date and time were incorrect in the bios, but this does not seem to be the case. Even though you can not boot, if you can get into the raid bios give us all of the errors or warnings that are shown we might be able to figure something out.

Ive had this happen when there was a problem with an external device like a usb rev drive or something of that nature. I would say its a hung service but those are supposed to time out at 120 seconds or so. Do you have any external scsi/firewire/usb devices attatched?

One other thing that you may also need to know, if you can take the server down for about 10-20 minutes then it may also be a good idea (if this server has raid) to boot into the raid bios and make sure no drives are degraded. good luck.

Well sounds like you have a lot of fun ahead of you. I can say that mac would be the prefered way to go for multiple reasons but it also depends on your existing infrastructure. I just set up a whole district on macs (they already had macs) but I have also setup schools with windows. I will tell you that the mac deployments end up working much smoother and are easier to lockdown and secure. The biggest thing is planning, lots of planning, you will always miss something but you better make sure its something small. Im doing a deployment for a law office that did no planning and just decided that they wanted to go mac and bought a bunch of stuff that was really expensive and apple told them it would work. Unfortunately they had no planning, so a job that normally takes about a week, is now taking months. The community here is great and full of people like you and me, post some more details about your existing servers, who knows you might need to use some of them for zimbra, etc. :-) Also if you absolutely have to have windows servers for some app you can take a "snapshot" of that system and run it in vmware fusion.

I had network browsing issues with symantec and symantec told me if I felt that the companies hardware firewall was decent to just uninstall the network protection component or disable through policy in symantec endpoint admin. I opted to completely uninstall but I can not remember the exact steps, it was a little tricky. I would recomend giving symantec a ring and ask them how to uninstall the network protection component (if you have a decent hardware firewall). I really wish I could help some more but its been a while since i have had to deploy endpoint.