HodgeHi

Sounds very tempting that XRAID but since we are only a primary school i think it maybe a little overkill to have two of em Personally i have no issues with the XRAID for performance. I net install my machines off it when needed. It hosts the pupils and Staff Home dirs and i install most of my apps from it using ARD. It does the job for us. I would like to be able to access it from either machine on the network but again over kill for us. I am going to try and get the OD-AD integration working again soon though so hopefully it should remove some of the workload running two independent domains. At the moment though all is ticking over OK. I too resort to the Apple forums although they aren't the best source of support. I have also contacted our reseller (KRCS sold us some of our kit) and there is a guy there Tony Rocco (who also frequents teh Apple forums himself) who is great. He gives advice and support and is great to have. I just don't want to pester him too much especially since we don't have any support contract with them.

Too true about when things go wrong. There is indeed a lot of head scratching. That is one of the biggest down-sides to owning OS X in education in the UK. When things are problematic there ain't too many places you can go. Not in the midlands anyway from what i can see. I have asked questions about server issues to the guys in the Apple Store in B'ham to see if they can answer but the Geniuses behind the Genius Bar can't answer them.

You gotta try though aint ya? We managed to have a few on running iMovie. Its just some failed. The projects aren't huge anyway and the data was already captured. The users were just editing the footage. The Users home dirs are stored on our XRAID which is connected to the Xserve via a 4Gb connection. The server is then connected to the network via a 1Gb connection. The classrooms connect using 10/100Mb/1000Mb and the AP connects to this in bridged mode which gives a 11n wifi connection to the Macbooks. It all works most of the time.

Just to let people know that in the OS X version you have to click and hold the mouse button to brig up the list of shapes. A little strange but not too difficult for them.

Hello all, I was wondering if anyone has come across this before. What it is is the shapes on the tool bar have a drop-down menu for the other shapes and the default shape is a circle. When the staff click on the drop down menu it does nothing. It seems there are no shapes to choose. You can still draw with the circle but cannot change the shape. I am using notebook 9.7.115.2 for Mac on OS X 10.5.2 running on a mac-mini with 1-2Gb RAM and core duo and core 2 duo machines. I also deployed the package using ARD 3.2

Hello, I have run into the following problem. It's gonna cause me tins of grief if i can't sort it out. The VMs are shared networking and i have disabled the parallels ethernet connection in the network prefs on OS X. I have also have the mac minis using dhcp on the Wired ethernet connection en). So the Mac mini gets it s IP address from the AD server. The XP VM has got shared networking set Since shared networking is used i disabled the parallels network and NAT ( the ones that give out 10.x.x.x range) in system prefs. My VMs are connected to a domain and have their documents redirected. I am using Parallels 5584 build on Leopard 10.5.2 and am also experiencing dropped network connections to the AD Server as well. It can even be when in use and therefore group policy fails to be implemented.

I will try this out. It could be just what I'm after.

I have 15 macbooks and an airport extreme 11n router which is set up in bridge mode. I have not received any complaints of login failure from either both OS X or XP. They have even used iMovie across the connection although it failed poorly i think. I have had users using garageband across the wifi network though with no issues.

Excellent. Thanks. How would i do this? I tried sysprep before and could never get my head around the reseal command and what it was for. I found it easier to deploy XP via RIS when coming from the AD than using Sysprep How would this make the names unique and the SIDs change?

Does each image you create have its own resource folder? I have put all dmgs all in the same place (not in their own unique folder) and they all share the one resource folder if you get what i mean. It has been a while since i created the last one. It is this part where the confusion creeps in. Do i need to do anything to the ntfs post-restore script to make it run ie set the executable bit? Sorry for all the questions just it has been niggling me for a while now and would love to get it working.

Hello each, I am currently looking at deploying Parallels into the classrooms running XP on a Mac mini. I have created the Parallels Vm IMage and copied up onto our XRAID. I would like to be able to edit the image and then re-deploy any changes to the machines using ARD. The issue is that XP is already joined to the AD. How can i deploy a general image and then get each machine to rejoin using a unique name? Hope someone can help as this would make one easy task. I could update image on my server and then deploy to all machines in school in 10 minutes.

You could opt for an 802.11n AP which is supposed to support up to 50 connections at a time with a 1Gb connection to the network?

I understand what you say it is just that i never get it to run the post-restore script. I currently use the provided bootcamp script modified to split the HDD exactly 50% for each (160Gb HDD) and thats as much as i can do. I have tried to put the XP image in the AFP share and get the ntfs-restore.sh to run as a post script and this is where i am stuck. It is around this area that i could do with some help to clarify things such as where do i put the .ntfs file used to restore the XP partition? Does it go into the resources images folder so it can mount with Net-restore? Is it acceptable to place it in the IMages apf share where it can be found since the share is mounted to provide the OS X image? If this could be clarified then it would be excellent. Obviously as i said i would help as much as possible. I may even produce a video of the whole process so as people can see just how to do it. PS. Site works quite well on an iPhone. You get the PDA/ mobile version so can see without scrolling.

More like the way it doesn't manage the media is the reason it can't. So is there a way to resolve this issue without resorting to scripts. Can I remedy the problem with RSM and get the tapes working. I read that i could change the label for each tape media on each daily backup change the tape and then run the task and it will make RSM know what each label for each tape is. Do i need to wipe down each tape and free it before i do this.

I will try to help in any way i can, although it may not be very much. What i would like to achieve is the following. I am sure it can be done. You use Net-restore to build the network images for both OS X and Xp (which by the way is now up to 3.4.1 and supports leopard builds) and then create the net insall sets. Configure the Netboot on the server to deploy the OS X image by default. Add Xp as a post-restore option so when it finishes the OS X install it starts the XP one without intevention. I would like the OS X to post-restore the Computer information from a CSV script that has the Hardware information to pull the right computer name down and change all computer specific information. This part can be done. I would like to set the XP partition as bootable once finished and allow it to restart into XP and then run a run once script that configures the XP build and joins it to the domain. The last part i am not sure as to how to go about it. I don't know much about scripting windows to join to a domain after install on its own. I assume you could do it through wmi or something like that. In the end it would add the computer to the right OU to then deploy software to the machine thus giving a completely automated dual-boot system installation. I haven't got any where near this yet. I am just happy that i can deploy both manually at the moment.

If you could would you be able to extend the article to perform the restore of the XP partition as a post-install of the OS X partition? I have tried to get this working now a few times but each time it just fails. I am not quite sure if i am configuring net-restore correctly and setting the scripts properly or even putting them in the correct post-restore folder to run when needed. Hope you can. Thanks. PS. Between the folks that do this sort of thing automatically we would get a decent wiki created on the subject since the info on this side is pretty sparse.

I have a feeling that it may be related to the media label. The scheduled copy to tape specifies the media label. How can i get this working normally again?

Hi everyone, I am running into an issue with regards to our backup of the SIMS DB. We have just had it moved over to a new server with a new tape drive (actually an old server and an old tape drive but new to SIMS) and i am now experiencing problems when the automated process is starting at 11pm. The system that the secretary has set up is the daily and weekly rotation of four tapes and one for each day. The backup is failing however and i manually have to intervene. Although this does not work right away. I have to manually free up the tape and deallocate before the backup will run. I have looked at the Server 2000 issue with tape back up and RSM and am wondering if it is an issue with 2003 as well. The error is "Cannot locate the specified media or backup device. This backup operation will terminate." Anyone got any pointers? I did not set up the scheduled backup operation. Mark came in to do it from Broadband Sandwell so i am unsure as to what he has configured.

The system in its current state is naff. It doesn't help the people that want to help themselves get out of debt. I had a loan from cahoot (one of the flexible ones) and the APR was at a good rate when i applied. Since the interests rates went up so did my cards APR. Now i was told my Customer Relations at Halifax that there is no requirement to follow suite and that it is just the "trend". I said great so wheres the trend that starts to see them come back down. She just laughed. What i am getting at here is this... I am now trying to obtain a consolidatory loan to reduce teh APR and switch to a fixed amount. The current APR on my Cahoot has now reached 20.9 % from 12 % when i had it just over a year ago. Do you think i can get a loan? I am looking for a loan that pays out the exact same amount each month and reduces the APR to around 6.5% and i get declined. I have just moved house and recently realised that i am not on the electorial roll. I started this in January and it is yet to be updated at the credit agencies. Bunch o'crap if you ask me.

I think the biggest problem is the fact that like most posts were hinting towards is that Ofice is used so widely. If Becta stopped forcing the use of Office and MS products down the throats of schools and moved towards Open source or alternative apps then the schools would be able to move. If that makes sense. It starts at the LEAs. They send a document out in .DOC format. Ain't got office to open it correctly?? Oh dear. It's things like this that keep the cycle going. It needs to be across the board. It ain't as if it costs money to change or to even have both. I work in a primary school and have both OS X and XP. OS X runs Neo Office and XP runs Office '03 since we already have the licenses. I won't buy any more though. I found the only thing that Open Office can't do (and neither can Mac Office) is Macros but our kids don't use them anyhow. Like someone said, they take what they learn with them. A word processor is a word processor. Tools may be in a different location but at least they can't take it for granted where everything is. :-)

I found the reason why it was not updating. The app wallsaver was stopping the screensaver from actually updating itself. My widget is updating itself and so is the screensaver but the mail rss reader is not. A few users have experienced this though so i will put this down to an issue with mail that i will ned to sort out. Thanks for the help though.

Thanks for your reply. I have since moved to RSS 2.0. The example i tried was using RSS 0.9 something or other. I have created my .RSS with the option for atom in the file. I have also added GUIDs into the file and Pub dates. I have a lastbuilddate tag just before the first item starts and also have a pubdate tag after the description in each item. It seems to update sometimes but not all the time. I have set a ttl tag of 1 minute but it does not seem to matter. I don't know whether it's just the readers and the way i want it to work which is the problem though. I don't want to have to refresh manually. I want the news to be added. If you have seen the RSS screen saver in os x then you will know what i mean. I want the new ones to automatically appear after it has cycled through the old ones when the ttl time has told them to check the source or whichever is sooner.

This is the first RSS feed i have created and so don't know much about the process. I tried the link and it came back as a valid feed. I have tried publish dates on each new item but it still doesn't update the client's feed straight away. It seems to need action before it goes down to the clients reader. Is this normal? I am after an automated system so information can be sent out and seen. Feed protocol? what are the options and i may be able to tell which one i have opted for (copied from a site really ;-) ) I was looking into wallsaver.app on OS X so i could have the RSS screensaver as their wallpaper with the updated news feeds as they happen. Hopefully you get the idea behind what i want to accomplish. If there is an easier way then please let me know. PS thanks for the link. I did resolve a few items to do with the image although it wasn't essential for validation.

Hello all, I'm looking into creating an RSS feed for staff information to be passed through to staff that have subscribed to the feed. I have created a widget in dashcode and have set up a .rss page that users can subscribe to but the problem i have is when the rss feed is updated with new items the widget or the clients are not updated with the new items. Am i missing something that makes the clients update their subscriptions? Or am i doing it wrong? I am updating the .rss page directly. There are no dates on each item. I have tried it with dates but it is still the same. Thanks in advance for any help.

Are there any errors in the logs under directory services?