HodgeHi

What version of net-restore are you using. If the later version then it is quicker than the previous versions. It is very bandwidth hungry. Apparently multicasting is supposed to be faster and better but not got that far yet. How many are you doing?

I'm assuming that you can't asset manage your macs using a PDC, or you can't remotely see what each machine is doing, or that you can't spotlight search every mac on the network for a specific file and then copy it to your own desktop, or that you can't lock all the screens with a message to tell the kids to turn around, or extract a report of all the hardware in the machine and get a list of the active mac addresses and export them into a csv file to use to create a batch file that creates a reserved address table in your dhcp? It does have it flaws as well though. IE it seems to not like running software update remotely. It also can be a bit buggy at times (especially when unlocking screens). personally i think ARD is a god send when managing multiple macs on a network, and it really does need to be seen to see the benefits. I have used netop 4 for the Windows side. I found it to be so bad i uninstalled it wrote it off as a bad purchasing decision (not one made by me). I think ARD is only about £300 for a unlimited client license?

is there not an issue with Adobe and network homes in general. it seems they don't support MS or apple's networked environments completely

If you have set them to start up at a set time of the day and are not in the School when this happens to see, if you are running ARD you could send a terminal command to see how long they have been up. uptime This will tell you how long the machines have been up for. Now if you run boot camp and the machines are in Windows they will not start up will they would if you shut them down in OS X the night before, but you were on about shutting them down. I found that due to them being boot camped that shutting them down using WGM didn't always work and since they were in Windows they time seems to get screwy and it then no longer works as expected. I set up a schedule in ARD and left it running which shuts the machines down at a set time. I have never had an issue with this. Remember to set them to shutdown and not restart or sleep. Save the schedule. I also have a batch file that shuts down the windows side at the same time. shutdown /s /m \\machine name /t 120 /c "the machine will shutdown in 2 minutes" Using this set up, i have more problems with Windows than i do with OS X, since windows wn't run the script as the screen is off although the machine is still on and not in standby. I am going to try the shutdownertron as soon as i get the time to.

The resolution needs to come from above. I mean the LEA and others like these that insist on sending documents through in Office format. We have no need to go to 2007 but the LEA send documents though in 2007 format. Now i have to install the file converter for them. If they used neutral formats then it wouldn't be a problem. Only if the docs have vb that isn't supported by others, should the MS Office format be used. I currently run iWork '08 on the OS X side and Office 2003 on the Windows side here. Office 2003 in the admin area, with the exception of the deputy head who uses Pages throughout and to be honest loves using it and now never uses Office 2003 at all. Just a pain to remember to save as a .doc format as sending .pages through hotmail is a nightmare

Hi All. Hope you had a nice break if you got one. I have been looking into Augmented records and so far not had too much luck with them. When i say looking at, i mean trying to create my own. I have configured the iCal service for use with AD users and also the Wiki (no blog) and online calendar. Now i want to use the iChat service in School for Staff. I have the iChat service set up and configured but cannot see the Buddies list. I think it is because there is no list of IM addresses in the contacts /information of the users. Now i have tried to create an augmented record but it did nothing. I'm not sure if the issue is that it didn't work or that the augmented record is not the correct way to go about it. I have decided to try an AD schema extension. Now to my question. I haven't done this manually before so am unsure as to how best o go about it. How would one create a schema extension for something like this? Not many people go this route for Apple-integration so not much info to go on for newbs. Hoping someone out there who has been brave enough in the past can give a little helping hand. I have looked at the shukwits AD integration scripts (and still am) but trying to get it to work. I tried this in the past with no problems but it looks like a few things have changed this time around. Thanks in advance

I understand why you would want to package the app, but if you use ARD then you could just copy the default folder over the network to the rest of the machines. Its a lot less irritating to be honest. Or IIRC you can do a custom install on one machine and then copy that install using ARD over to the rest of the machines. There is a package creator that uses snapshots for the mac but can't remember what it is. It may be worth looking into that as well. I too, need to look at some package creation software to ease deployment of a base model after installation. PS. there is also a Microsoft document available on how best to deploy Office 2004. http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/d/d/3ddaa17e-d508-4c28-98be-ca633ac3b7de/MicrosoftOfficeforMac2004ResourceKitv2.pdf Let me know how it goes

I had a couple of batteries that needed replacing the other week. Both were Macbook ones and were not any where near as bad as the OPs battery issue. They were dead. Now i took these to the Apple store after calling the Applecare support team. I went through the problems over the phone and although there was a battery recall going on, my batteries were not in the Model number ranges. They still replaced them though which was nice. After my experience with Pinnacle (v 9.4.3 onwards) i would never use it again. The amount of problems that i had with that software was ridiculous. Dropped frames mis-synched audio constantly. Frequent crashes during the encoding to DVD stage. Updates were useless. They managed to get the mis-synched audio down to a few seconds every minute of footage or so after an update, but it broke something else. Then they decided that enough was enough with 9.4.7 and thought if they want a fully functioning piece of software then they would have to go out and purchase v10 instead and left 9.4.7 in its sorry state. That was the last i ever used it. £240 i paid for that crap.

If you have remote management configured on these machines (ARD) then screen sharing is disabled by default. If you use net-restore to deploy your images you can have it set up ARD on an account for you during the imaging process. This should then remove the Screen sharing option. I think you can also manage sharing preferences in WGM on a leopard server as well.

Open Office 3 has just been released as a native install now. It no longer needs the X11. Upon my testing it seems a lot better for this.

That'll be me then I was never taught grammar at school, so am not entirely sure what to do with these '. But it is not an excuse. I keep meaning to do some research on grammar but never seem to have the time. One day though...

The Template is protected by root access. You will need to sudo to do the business. You can also get a small app that will do just this. The app can be found here: Downloads | Apple-Scripts.com Its called believe it or not, Template and its the last on the list. Should make things a bit easier if you are not (like me) down with Terminal.

I get irritated quite easily at the moment. I try not to let it show but sometimes i can't keep it in. The thing that is annoying me sooo much at the moment is the fact that the amount of work i have put into getting the systems up and running and the services i have put into place just don't get used. For example, i have started the wiki service and added content to help them with their day to day ICT (training is an issue and i am aware of it and trying to amend this) and what do i get? We need training. Yes. have you read the items/content on the wiki? Oh, i ain't got time to read that. I just want you to tell me how to do it. What they really mean is that they want me to do it for them. This annoys me as i am trying to pull out all the stops but they seem intent on doing very little to change the fact that they know very little and willing to keep it that way. As soon as the training sessions are active, i bet no one comes. And that's what it is like and that's what drives me nuts! Why do i bother? But what really makes me fly off is when they ask a question and the answer is there to read and available. Sorry. Rant over.

You could try these. Don't know if they would just sell the cases though. Could always ask... WOC Home

Hi all, Not long ago i posted a thread about a problem with a printer not printing until i interact with the print queue. This sounded funny and indeed it was. I thought that the above error was related to the smart board gallery being installed on a share. I have since started googling the error i get: "SMART UI 32-bits gateway error" "Can't load SMART Utilities library (code 5) access is denied" This seems to be the problem. As soon as i click the OK button the printing starts. I have looked in Task Manager and found that the process that spawned the error is Spoolsv.exe. Now the question is what can i do to sort the problem out. I don't even know what's causing the issue. Hope someone can help. The server is Windows Server 2003 SP2 fully patched.

I haven't tried time machine but to be honest, i'm not sure if i trust it enough. I have never used it but have heard a few stories of data being lost due to time machines failures. I suppose i could try it out for a bit. It's better than what i have at the moment. I look forward to the script that you mention. Thanks

Hello, I am trying to backup data on the XRAID in OS X Server 10.5.5. I have tried Rysnc X to backup a rotational set of Data but it seems to fail miserably when doing so. The app seems a bit buggy as well on Leopard since even the modify button on the scheduled scripts doesn't work. So my question of how do you back up the data incrementally in OS X still stands. What do you use to do the job? (simpler and freer = )

First off, i would suggest reading the AD-OD sandbox document. This should answer most of your question relating to how the OS X server integrates with the AD network. You really need to get the OD server up and running before anything else really. This will give you the ability to restrict what the mac clients can see on the network. This should hide all the servers if you wish it to. The other way you could do the user accounts is to create a limited account and manage it through the parental controls. Apparently there is a bug with the Parental controls section though that makes things not work right. I don't know any more than that. What you could do is create a limited account and then configure it to your liking. Then when all of that is done log out and then log inas an admin and copy it into the user template folder. What happens then in this case is if your clients are bound to the AD, the users would log in and have their home dirs created from the template user and all of the settings you made would be there. Heres a link to a guide i used: Making a default template for os x You can also lock certain files in the template so they can't be overwritten. I used this guide to lock the desktop picture plist file so they couldn't change it. Locking plist files Its under the "customising the User template section". Mobile accounts synchronise their stuff backwards and forwards to and from the server. I don't think it complains much about not finding the server though. It is essential to use a mobile account when running Parallels though as it doesn't like being run across the network. Hope this helps a little.

Fusion 2 Betas' unity is very slick. It works almost seamlessly. You could (if your licenses permit) install the boot camp option and use that partition to boot the VMware. This means that you get the best of both worlds. I've not tried this so unsure as to how it works, but Parallels has the option to use the Boot Camp partition. Whether it converts the partition into a virtual HDD i don't know. Perhaps its worth a look. Maybe someone can say how it does its thing?

There is also a vbs script in the AD-OD sandbox file. I used this to import my users into AD for the OD integration. The script creates the users, builds the home dir path home drive letter and creates the My Documents folder and assigns the users permissions to that folder as well. It imports the script from a CSV file that is relatively easy to get from SIMS although i would love to do this automatically.

It seems to be OK in Safari Version 3.1.2 (5525.20.1). Although i do also get the errors that DMcCoy got when clicking the login links on the left.

The only time time i have seen slowdown on these boards along the line that you mention, is when i had them connected to a Mac mini through Parallels. It was only then that the board slowed down. This is just a standard smartboard though not an integrated one. I put it down to a resource issue since the minis where running at almost 100% memory and CPU usage according to ARD anyway. These minis were core 2 duo 1.8, the ones having problems were running Leopard with Parallels and 1GB ram. So the resources would definitely have been an issue. They also had integrated graphics. Since moving them over to Bootcamp, i have not seen the slow down issue again.

I don't think leopard adds them to the search path by default now although i may be wrong. IIRC if you script the AD connection, you need to add the path as well using the dscl command, although each time i tried it failed. There may be some underlying issue here...

I believe that firewire may be on its way out. The Xserves have had the front firewire replaced. The Macbook has from the looks of it had their firewire removed. I only think it will be a matter of time, possibly when USB 3 arrives, when the macbook pro's will lose their firewire ports as well.

Download the hitachi disk utils. i can't remember what they are called now. I will see if i can find them. I used these to sort out disk drives for the xbox when swapping them over. It may help with the issue you have.