stevehp

When you say "dry erase" do you mean a whiteboard or a chalkboard type surface? If it's a whiteboard then I believe that's your issue. Most whiteboards have a magnetic surface and that will most certainly cause your SMART Board to go awry. I would have district and or building maintenance personnel mount the SMART Board directly to a non-metallic wall (plaster, drywall, concrete block).

The service is shared with ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) on Windows XP. I tend to disable that service on all of my images even though we have a GPO that prevents the firewall from running. If you open the Windows Firewall control panel on an admin acccount it will be or should be all greyed out.

iTunes stores the location of the library/media in a XML file. The location of the library within that XML file is encoded in Base64. Believe me I've tried it that direction, but I ended up using a redirect script for My Music and placing a new My Music folder in the root of the user's local profile. That stops our servers from filling up with iTunes media, but it forces the user to stick to one PC for downloading and syncing.

Yep it does store that location, but in an encoded format inside an XML file. I tried it that way, but I ultimately could not and gave up. It was much easier to fool Windows than to fool iTunes.

The way I got around this was to use a script that changes the location of My Music from within the users home folder to a location inside their local profile. That way music, videos, apps, etc.. get stored on the hard drive of the machine they happen to be using and not our server hard drives. It ties them down to one machine for iTunes usage, but it stops home folders from balloning in size. The steps I take are: 1. Create a profile that has a My Music folder within another folder called Local Data 2. Add the registry modification script to either the Startup folder in the Start Menu or in registry 3. If need be another script can be added that will create a shortcut to this local My Music folder to say the home folder or the desktop, etc. 3. Copy profile to default user 4. Either rinse rather and repeat or create an image with the changes. 5. Verifiy with a domain user that iTunes is looking in the correct folder for it's media files. Click on Edit then Preferences and switch over to the advanced tab and look inside the text box to verify it's pointing in the right direction.

We apparently are having an "Apple engineer" coming in to look at our issues. I've tried so many different things including the plain golden triangle, dabbled with a cylinder of destiny on one client with two augemented users. Right now I have a cart of macbooks that use local user accounts with managed system preferences that seem to work without any hangs but that's a less than ideal setup for us. I cringe to think what this magic Apple engineer is going to do.

So I came in yesterday morning at the High School and from the door outside the server room I could hear this obnoxious beeping noise, which made my heart sink as we don't need another failed piece of equipment. So not to make a long story out of this I find the beeping is originating from my FOG server. The beeping is the alarm on one of the raid controllers because the raid set I have on that card has failed. Two Seagate Cheetahs have given up the ghost which is unfortunate because they contained the OS and the FOG install. I have tried to rebuild both the logical drive and either of the physical drives and they both fail so the drives truly are gone. The server itself is fairly old, a Gateway 930 series with dual Pentium 3's and equally aged drives. The exception though is I added another raid controller and some newer, though still quite old 15k Cheetahs from a scrapped Dell server. That's the basis of my question. The raid set on the newer controller contained the images, but not the other important part; the mysql database. So what chances do I have in reimporting those image files into another FOG install without the database?

Little update on the situation here. After moving a single cart to the new SSID our Macbooks at least OS wise are happily running for the most part. We still have some hiccups every now and then. The staff are still complaining of sluggish computers and it seems like it's mostly tied to Internet use (i.e. wiki creation, general browsing, etc.) . I tested a cart and true to their word Safari was dog slow at loading, animated images stuttered like crazy and it bogged down the rest of the OS as well. I turned off the DNS prefetching feature which did nothing. I also have cookies, and other caches redirected locally but I did turn that off to test and it made no difference. Anybody have any other ideas? On a related note I installed Chrome on a few and it zipped along just fine, but for some reason or another some of the managed preferences I applied wouldn't work for instance the home page and start-up behavior.

Very true. I just need to reinstall ARD as I formatted my 10.5 Macbook and installed a newly purchased copy of 10.6.3 at the Apple Store last weekend. All of our imaged clients have remote access enabled so SSH and ARD will work. I'm just not wanting to tie down an individual to a certain computer. So I'm going to hold off on creating a local user account. I have one Macbook setup to our OD only with a test user account created in WGM and that still beach-balled so I can rule out the slow nature of SMB causing the hangs. I might transition them to a cylinder of destiny configuration though as I'm envisioning our Windows file servers getting their storage space sucked down to nothing with iMovie and iPhoto use. We can still map a drive/folder to their Windows Home, but I've not seen much cross platform use so it won't hurt our users much to have two homes. Plus the homes on the Xserve are populated correctly the first time versus me having to tell staff and students to create this folder or such and such application won't work on your Macbook For the time being our contracted network engineers are going to add a SSID to our Cisco wireless controller that will patch straight into our VLAN 8 that the servers reside on. We'll also do the same for our wired iMacs as they seem to have the same issue. It's a dirty trick, but I'm going to test that for a few days and see what that nets us. Thanks HodgeHI and to everyone else that has provided suggestions. I appreciate it.

Yeah, our home folders are on a windows share via smb. When compared to a Windows PC be it wired or wireless the performance is rather poor. Clicking on the Apple menu on the left hand side results in a beachball, opening a finder window takes longer than usual, and just the act of opening iMovie takes on average about two minutes. I ran tcpdump but I couldn't read the output, anyone have a nice and easy way of deciphering it? Ping, dig, host all return correct information for forward and reverse queries. Standalone Macs with local accounts work beautifully, but I'm not even going to suggest that we do that for sixty plus of them. This is a very frustrating issue, and I've had my fair share of them but this one takes the cake.

I've been looking on an off at this issue for the past few days, and the only success I've had was to hardwire a Macbook up to a switch that is on the same vlan as our Xserve and the Windows servers. Once connected to it the beachball all but disappears. Things like iMovie that would sit and spin for ages either hardwired or wireless would open up and be ready in seconds when I plugged it into the switch. What that means, I really don't know.

We have nearly the same issues. Macbooks joined in a magic triangle that will beachball on any little task you do. I have two carts with 30 laptops each. Nobody has complained about it yet, but I see it everytime I work on one. The Macbooks are mid 2010 models running 10.6.3-10.6.5. Xserve is running 10.6.5 The Windows side of things is all Windows Server 2003(for now). DNS is run off our DC. I had a beachballer in my office for a day and went through log after log, setting after setting. The only thing I didn't do was wipe the drive and and not join it to OD or AD. I did rule out hardware failure as the Apple Diagnostics come back with no issues whatsoever.

They are, well at least I can vouch for the EXOPC being manufactured by Pegatron. I have mine in hand at the moment. I recieved it about three weeks ago. The SSD in the EXO is a Sandisk P4 (32 or 64GB). According to the diagnostic tool the Crystal HD chip is the 970015. The EXO has a different touch screen installed than the other "slates" that Pegatron manufactures, but beyond that and the SSD of course, it's the same. I use mine to keep myself a tad bit more mobile during the day. I have OneNote open and a web browser open to our web based help desk so I can check tickets, and such. The battery life is pathetic when compared to a tablet like an iPad, but it's not an appliciance like the iPad, it's a computer with a full blown OS. I use mine in five to ten minute sessions and let it sleep the rest of the time and that makes it last an entire day without a recharge. So the battery life doesn't much worry me.

Is this a unibody Macbook? If not only 32bit editions of Windows are supported. Boot Camp: Macs that work with 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7 You said new so I'm assuming it's an unibody, but I thought I would ask.

Indeed. Pegatron also makes the EXOPC Slate and a few other Windows 7 slates. They also manufacture the IPad. I preordered the EXOPC slate, so I will find out in the next two weeks (ships the 18th of this month) how they compare to an ITampon/Ipad.

I do the same and it works beautifully except for a couple things. Firstly I need to change something as even though it writes a text file it doesn't seem to check said file when it's run again. The other is just a cosmetic issue. The Adobe uninstaller command line app will not run silently so I get a maze of command prompt windows as the app runs. I've yet to look into it indepth. If anyone has any ideas feel free to provide them.

Got a little issue with the FOG service. I'm imaging a CAD Lab(AutoCAD, ProE, etc..) and after imaging I have sysprep run and do it's thing. After sysprep has run I have the host auto login into the local administrator account twice. One for the name change and the other for the domain join. The issue is that the hostname changer service wants to change the computer name before the desktop loads. So I get five or six error dialogs stating "this application has failed to initialize because Windows is shutting down." So those apps don't run at all which is fine, but what isn't fine is that the system then sits at the desktop and doesn't restart automatically I have to manually do it. Can I introduce a delay into the hostname changer service? Or perhaps can I just leave out the auto logins in the sysprep.inf of my future images? If I leave them out and let the host sit at the login dialog will it join the domain? I know for certain it will change the name, but I'm unsure if it will join the domain.

The US website for FLIP has version 5.6 available for download. The site specifies that's it's US only, so I'm not sure what, if any modifications they would do for you guys across the pond. If you'd like to try the file I will would be glad to get it to you somehow.

Thanks for answering those questions for me. The remote desktop functionality being based on VNC isn't show stopper by any means. I will get used to it. That will make it much easier for me as I'll be able to use readily available VNC viewers. Thanks again.

While we are on the subject of a Mac server I'd like to ask the "Mac experts" a question or two. We are getting our Mac server in July so I'd like to clear some things up in my head before then. The main question being about AD. I've read about and I'm interested in Likewise Open. Though I'd like to hear anyone's thoughts on the matter. How stable is the AD connection using the included AD plugin in 10.6? Would it make much sense to use Likewise over the included AD software in OSX? Remote desktop capabilities with Windows. In other words what software can I use? I know I can use VNC, but I'd rather not mirror the desktop on the server. I have my own Macbook, but I'm booted into Windows 7 on it most of the time as our main infrastructure is Windows based. So that's why I'd like a Windows app for that purpose. From my understanding and research the software updates functionality built into OSX server will not schedule or do automatic installs of updates it sends to clients. Am I misunderstood or not. If I'm not, is their anyway around that? That's all I can think of right now. I might have some more later down the road.

I had that same issue with a Dell Latitude e6400. I had used an image which I created for a laptop cart before on some other e6400's the school had purchased. Although they had purchased the same model they failed to notice they had a Dell wireless card instead of the Intel card the image had drivers installed for. So the End Program dialog kept coming up again and again at shutdown/restart until I figured out it was the Intel drivers throwing a hissy fit.

That's also why I've been disabling it. Nine times out of ten any spyware or viral infestations I have with machines the bugger always turns up in the hidden restore folders.

I managed to get the software to install via a GPO. Start the installer(the .exe). Don't go through the prompts, instead find the temp files the executable extracted (check user profile\local settings\temp in XP). Copy everything in the folder just to be safe. Open the msi in ORCA or your favourite MSI editor and remove the launch condition table. It will install without nagging about the exe anymore. I haven't tested this with a camera yet, but the software seems to be fully functional. One issue I did have was that the software ignored my special folders location(My Videos, etc.), which I had changed via a script. Another script fixed that right up though, but then I needed to have a robocopy script move the FlipShare Data dir to the redirected folder location for My Videos. Phew..

I guess I'll have to dig deeper as our district purchased one for dang near every teacher. So that means installing it on 100-200 PC's. Oh boy.

That may be so, but I was merely giving my two cents on the experiences I've had with sysprep. In my case using the gui would cause it to ignore the answer file each and everytime, no matter the options I would select. It's possible I was doing something wrong in the gui, but the command prompt method has worked without issue each and everytime.