HodgeHi

The library software i spoke of is called Accessit Library Software. As far as i know it is only a small company. It seems so in this country but may have a larger size in its home-grown location of New Zealand. But even open-source has migrated Firefox across multiple platforms. What aspects of SIMS is causing the problem? You say richness, but again the library software runs identical on all systems even the browser-based system. I admit i am not a programmer or designer but am a fustrated computer user who sees applications getting in the way of choice between various OS platforms. Nearly everyone complains about the way Microsoft do things and yet everyone supports them regardless. Yes it is the most used OS in the world, but why is that?? Maybe its because the apps you use don't run on anything else.

Hi, I am looking for a gigabit switch that i can hang an XRAID from, but since i am relatively new to fibre switches am struggling to work out the type i need. The connection from the XRAID seems to be an SFP but thats as much as i know, if that is even correct? I have also been told that only a few switches are recommended for XRAID connections and have seen a list but its not a long list by any means, about three manufacturers. Any info on gigabit switches that i could use would be brilliant. I have looked at a few but get lost in the technological acronyms. I do need to research the different types more...i have seen these Mini GBICs which i don't know what they are? I need to get a switch so i can get a bit more redundancy from the RAID as well as connect more than just one Xserver to it when more arrive (not for a while yet though). Its part of the configuration of the integration of the OSX into AD but i cannot create the shares on the RAID from the server connected to it since it is joined only to the Active Directory. If anyone can help on this then that would be ace.

Why are sotware companies still only writing thier applications for one platform? I understand the time to port but a Library solution that we purchased (which wasn't bad in cost at all) runs on all platforms and can run through web browsers to search on client machines. In this day and age where the trend is schools are opting for open-source platforms or other alternatives (OS independent, Apple etc) to Windows, schools don't want to be tied down to one OS due to their most important application not being flexible.

I have got the mail service up and running now so i can start my trials. Will post back to let all know the outcome. Whether it holds up to the task assigned. All this running on a Mac-mini with 512MB RAM. XServe coming soon as well.

I will check it out soon as an alternative if any issues with the mail service in OS X crop up that i feel are just too irritating to put up with. I will give the OS X mail service a trial run and see how it goes.

I did look at zimbra but i didn't have the time to thouroughly test it out. I thought since we needed the os x server to manage the os x clients anyway we would already have a mail service that we could leverage. but from what i did see on the website it looked pretty good. do you know if it is web-based only(imap?) or pop3 as well?

The development of ICT within my school has not been seen in around 2 years with very little support. They then employed me to look after the ICT hardware and network for not a lot of cash really considering the amount of work put in. I think the lack of development is where the money has come from. I agree at the moment the cals and licenses from the xp clients being dual-booted need to be used but the hardware being replaced covers those cals but hopefully is just while the migration of remaining apps takes place. I was actually referring to the cals needed when purchaseing exchange as i was told extra cals needed to be purchased either per device or per user if accessing from the outside world. Obviously to roll out mail services for all pupils as well as staff this would of been expensive in the term of a waste of money. I have mentioned before that i do not understand why cals need to be purchased. after all you buy the server you buy the client and you buy the cabling that connects the two together. where the hell does the cal fit in? An extra cost for naff all. The school is indeed a small school which has one ICT Suite of the 26 iMacs. This was the reason we purchased the mabook trolley. admittedly it is a lot of cash, but the fact that they can be utilised anywhere in the school is a bonus for us since it now gives us the ability to have 2 ICT Suites at the same time. And since the pupils would be using them for creative work (iLife mainly) was the reason to go with apple macbooks. we got a reasonable price on all the hardware though so not too bad. I thought that the EOL would actually be longer as well with macs since when upgrades come along (when CPU architecture isn't being changed) they generally run on machines that have quite a lifespan. Tiger installs on and old G3 clamshell iBook. Not natively i admit but can be made to install none-the less and runs fine. So hopefully the lifespan of the machines should go past 3 to around 5 years, saving us a bit of money since we dont need to upgrade hardware for the next OS. But i also do believe more educational software is now being ported to support macs since quite a lot of schools are now taking them in. Right now the OS X server is a mac mini with 512 MB of RAM and doing a grand job at that even net-restoring to 26 clients, slowly yes but still deploying. The school is very ICT dependent. In saying that i mean the ICT is used every day and is utilised at the moment to the fullest potential that the staff can give. The pupils create some decent work in these lessons but i feel that their work can be taken in a different direction with collaborative projects utilising resources such as iLife (just due to the simple method of working with it and creating some good quality work with little effort) and then being able to get parents to view this work either through podcast vids or other means. Work is being carried out across the board where ICT is concerned within our school. Taking in the mail lists for parents to subscribe to to get info about whats coming up or happening at school and website development that lets parents view the pupils work etc. Also maybe create pages of it themselves. I think the investment pays off in ICT when it is used the way you envision it should be used by both pupils and staff. I hope with new hardware the staff will start to get on board. The pupils already are since the macs arrived they race each other to get to them (we only had six at first). I feel that ICT development is going in the right direction in our school and that fact that apple hardware was purchased as opposed to standard pc gear is just a small part of it. It just gives us the option of what to use. The pc licenses would need to be purchased either way so to have the option is great for both the kids and staff, plus the additional software that comes with the gear. I hope i have managed to cover all of the points you made above. I am not trying to defend myself just to point out our reasons from breaking away from the norm. ICT should be fun and whatever makes it fun is all good, isn't it? Anyway post any issues that you may see i don't mind positive criticism as it all helps point out things i may have missed.

I have recently purchased 26 iMacs and a mobile laptop trolley with 16 macbooks on them. I consulted with the Head about the purchase and he was eager. We had a trial period for a Yr3 group that were learning the iLife suite and they came up with some great results. This was one reason that we purchased the macs. The way the pupils got to grips with the OS and the apps was amazing. They created some excellent comic strips using the included the comic life. Being Intel-based as well means they can be boot-camped resulting in a dual-functioning machine that can double up as an additional mac suite. We are the first Primary School in our district to be migrating to mac Hadrware and the schools for the future are very excited at the prospect and have already been in to show their enthusiam. I say this because maybe there is a high school around your area that has macs and skilled users that would be willing to assist with your training. We are lucky that we have being supported by our local high school. They have been excellent with their support and have also invited our staff to attend their school and utilise their suite for some hands on training. Overall though i feel that if schools keep with the same old then things will never change. Schools will still keep purchasing Microsoft products and paying through the nose for license and cal fees. I have now got a Server 2003 Domain with an OS X server integrated and the mail service running on that meaning i can now distribute email addresses to the pupils as well as the staff. Even if they do not use them it hasn't cost anything in cals so there really isn't a waste of money. Software is also slowly starting to support macs more now as well so it won't just be for the music/video. One of if not the MAIN reason for migration is also viruses and malware. Right now there is no issue, and being a primary school that means a little less to worry about on my part. Just my two pence worth.

My machines booted and then got to the point where it loads all the inital stuff then says starting windows. This is where it is supposed to format the HDD but instead i got the error message posted in my first post. Why they can't just give the option to stick with either RIS (without any modifications, since my clients worked fine from RIS original) and just give the option to add WDS and allow conversion to the wim file system? And why give the option to remove a service pack in the add/remove programs when the un-install just doesn't put the original files back. Surely it's just a desctructive un-install? Admittedly it would mean more file storage space to backup the previous versions but in this day and age the amount of disk storage needed in any network infrastructure would meet the requirements.

I just didn't have the time to sit and try to get my head around the whole WDS thing. It could possibly be the easiest thing to do, just i have got enough to get my head around this holiday without adding to it. This said i decided to use the legacy WDS, which supposedly is RIS. BUT it didn't work. I don't know what MS have done to RIS but my clients just refused outright to boot from it. Couldn't find any info on resolving this issue and was losing time so i decided to remove sp2 and install sp1. So far so good all seemed well. I installed RIS services (the one before WDS) and installed fine. I proceeded to create the flat image from the winxp cd only to find that an OSC.cab (i think thats what it was called) was missing and so i couldn't really tell just how many of these issues i was going to run into. I decided to re-install my DCs instead with SP1. Only took 1/2 hour and was backup. Don't think i will be using Sp2 just yet.

Just to tidy up the thread. I have since managed to get the OS X clients to send and receive mail, i think by putting the OD Master in the contacts list. Clients using Outlook and Outlook express need to have clear text password enabled as they can not authenticate using Kerberos for pop3 or smtp.

Just to tidy up the thread. I have since managed to get the OS X clients to send and receive mail, i think by putting the OD Master in the contacts list. Clients using Outlook and Outlook express need to have clear text password enabled as they can not authenticate using Kerberos for pop3 or smtp.

I have just run into an issue where my PC will now not boot from the Network. I get a blue screen of death stating that there has been a initialization failure occur while booting from the network. I am trying to boot from a Server 2003 using service pack 2. What can i do to get this working. I need to ris asap as i have to rebuild all clients today!!?

Macbook Pro with 2GB RAM running server2003 and win xp client in Parallels to test network configs at the mo and running it at home with server 2003 that the os X server is pointing at to test ad-od integration. Core Duo (no 2 in there ) 120GB HDD 2GB RAM and all the usual stuff wifi,bluetooth etc.

This is typical of Pinnacle. They did the same for Xp too. They realsed an update for Pinnacle 9.4.3 or something like that to 9.4.7(?) and it broke it. The forums were rife with anger and fustration as it was supposed to fix a long on-going problem. I too fell for this and ended up re-installing Pinnacle, no small task in itself The resolution? Buy V10 just released!!!

Any chacne of having a copy of or a look at your apple scripts to run the bootcamp setup? I need to do 15 macbooks and then 15 imacs in total so it could be really handy. I would like to see how it was created so i can get a better understanding of how to create them. I am a total newb when it comes to applescript and scripting in general really. hope you can help as there isn't a lot of info around about bootcamp deployment.

Hello All, Just an update on my mail issue. I have since found that the users in the AD have been addded to the com.apple.access_mail group when entered into the SACL for the mail service. The mail function has not been enabled however in the WGM though. Is it supposed to? I have tried to configure the mail client to access the service from the OS X side and cannot get it to accept the users id. I have checked the kerberos app and found that when it checks the mail server it then hands a ticket for the pop service or imap service depending on which one you choose, so the kerberos seems to be working but it still fails to login the user. The mail log states a line like badlogin: name of machine and ip address and the GSSAPI generic error. Is this an issue from the non-binding. I don't really wnat to mess up the client setup since it is working at the moment and i have yet to finalise some settings before i continue to re-build the domain. Just wondering if amyone has come across and resolved these issues? thanks

reg edit to unhide admin account you could try this. I don't know if it works as i have never tried it. Just googled and this came up. Worth a shot?

Ii have tested the preferences with both machine and user accounts and they are applyiing nicely. This allows me to manage both sides of things even though the OS X clients are not binded to the OD domain (just pointing at it for authentication). I am still unsure what sort of repercussions that this will bring though. Will there be issues with Kerberos authentication, although i have moved the local home directory from the clients to the AD server that is hosting the home shares and the users are not being asked for authentication. I am just starting to configure and set up the mail service to authenticate the AD users but have run into an issue where the service is not authenticating the user whilst setting up the account in Mail, but the setting is not enabled in WGM. I have read the bit about SACLs in server admin, but at this moment in time its not making much sense. How does the OD server know that these accounts are able to access the maill server when it is not configured for each user in either the OD or the AD? If anyone has got this working could they give me a point in the right direction please? Many thanks.

Well how about that. Got in this morning and first thing i did was boot the imac that i was working on last night before home-time (which was still not applying the managed prefs) and unbinded it from the OD. I then proceeded to remove the LDAP settings and deleted the account from the OD Master, since it had to be forcibly removed. I then just added the Client's LDAP setting back in, this time without binding and restarted the machine. It pulled the managed settings first time and all accounts were available. The machines at home aren't using Boot Camp either so there must be something else thats stopping it, but ther isn't any real need to be binded to the OD is there? I will test some computer preferences and see how they go. Many thanks for sticking with me through these mega-long posts ;-)

Update! and it s good news!!!! I have created a small-ish network at home to try and resolve the issue without the other crap involved. I set up my mac-mini as the os x server, the macbook pro running server 2003 in parallels and turned off the g5 cuz its too loud and borrowed a laptop from work. I have configured each piece as described above in your first post Kingswood and reached the point where i needed to add the clinet to the OD. Do you think this would bind? Would it hell. I then went though the leveraging doc to find the piece that would put dsconfigad into debug mode and stumbled across the piece of just continuing without the binding. I tried this and then logged out. I then proceeded to checkthe info and i got some network accounts are available. Bloody great!!so i restarted the lappy and then voila, a green ball full of accounts so i logged in spelling the password wrong a few times in my haste to get in and YES a managed dock popped up on the left. Fantastic. I now need to re-produce these steps in work, but i am now more optimistic. Also being as it is not bound to the OD it should not cause an issue with the Boot Camp either. Thanks for the help. Will let you know how it goes at work tomorrow!!

I would just like to disagree on that one. I have had numerous issues that i needed help resolving. This mainly due to the fact that i knew diddly squat about the fundamental workings of the ICT infrastructure until my first break into the technical side (i owe a nice guy called Clive a BIG thanks for that ). So i needed help with more than a few issues (just search for my username and reduce the hits to 100 per page !) and found the answers to be right here for what i would say was all of my problems. I know it sounds like i am brown-nsing but it needs to be said, since forums are very seldom as good as this one. I had an issue recently with OS X integration. I posted on the AFP forum first since it is supposed to be a large community for OS X admins but have yet to get a decent response to help me solve my problem. I posted here the following day i think (a long post) and upon posting Kingswood replied with an equally long post and has stayed with me until i could resolve the problems. Not many forums will do that. So thank you for all your help with my issues and hopefully i will be able to return the favour when i am as good as you folks. OK end of sucking up now!!

I have just tried to set this setting and lo and behold i have NO plists just to make my day a little better. Can it BE any worse????? I think i am the only one that is having such an issue, so there must be something that is slipping past without detection. It doesn't help that i have been pounding at this for two weeks solid (nearly straight through as well considering the hours put in)!! I won't let it beat me though!! Grrrrr PS i downloaded the 10.4.9 combo update as it came out just as i updated my server and did not see it in the list.

i like parallels. I think it is perhaps the best way to run windows on a mac. With it now supporting the BootCamp partition as its HDD to boot from it means that you can have the best of both worlds. Bootcamp on a MacBook Pro gives you the full aero engine (if you want that sort of thing). I have not tested the bootcamp partition support but i assume that it would give a native VM since the hardware would be supprted through drivers already intsalled. Perhaps someone who has tested this can confirm what it is like? I do like how you can drag and drop files from windows onto the mac desktop and Vice Versa without the need for any addidtion software. Very useful and teamed up with Virtual desktops gives you the ability to swing between the two OSes with just a keyboard shortcut. Great Stuff.

Kingswood, Thanks for sticking with me through this time (unlike my hair has managed to ). I have tried the first point you suggested using a cable instead of wireless and i see your point about the third-party WAPs which is why i dumped the connection to the netgear and switched over to the new extreme AP. The wifi WPA key is also in the keychain since it doesn't ask me on login to connect. I will look into the services loading thing as soon as i re-build the server since i had problems yet again with the binding thing and so demoted the server to stand alone and now it has picked up the wrong default realm and can't be bothered to figure out how to change this setting especially as i can no longer log into the WGM or kerberise the domain either. I used the ip address for the server bind to the OD and it did use the from server option. I did change this to open directory but if the 2nd point you mentioned is the problem then all of this would have been for nowt. I do beleive that i am banging my head against a brick wall at the moment with this and cannot rule out the network issues as being the main cause. I have scheduled the domain re-build for the easter break so will be able to get a better understanding of the issues with this resolved. Until then i may just duplicate the AD to the OD setup and manage the users and computer across both directories. When looking a future changes i can't see any major changes affecting the users apart from moving OUs at the end of july. For the time being anyway. The books WILL be ordered (through the School) and so hopefully i will have a better understanding of the process. I do feel that it needs more support from Apple with regards to this side of things as it is what wil be predominantly happening across the UK, thats if they want a bigger market share. PS. One more thing i meant to ask. You said that you have just rolled this sort of thing out in your first post. Does this also entail the Boot Camp area as well since i am a little confused aboout this part. and heres why:- If i join the AD domain under windows XP it will create a Computer account. Then when i try to bind using OS X the computer account will already exist. How would this cause issues if any? Once again thanks for any help.