HodgeHi

10.3.9 doesn't support ACL's. You will need to upgrade to at least Tiger to use them and then run a command to enable ACL support. You can however use posix to adjust the permissions but it will only be for the owner, group and everybody permissions.

We are using StudyWiz. It has the option of hosting it yourself. It helps keep the costs down

Personally I find using the Simple Finder with parental controls enabled a pain in the ass. When you open an application that has been restricted, DON'T choose the always allow option. It doesn't place the application in the list of allowed applications in the Parental Controls. I have looked for about 2 hours and still cannot find where OS X places the setting. I accidentally chose this option for the System Preferences application and now they can open it whenever they want. And it places a shortcut inside the allowed applications window for ease of access. From my searching the only known way of reverting this is to delete the user and re-create the Parental Controls.

10.7.3 has a fix for using .local domains. I would probably take a back up of your server/clients and test.

Hello, I'm not sure if we have a section for this type of thing. If so please move it to where it belongs I am after some ideas on how to build a spreadsheet project for some year 5/6 pupils for this afternoon. I was thinking about building a media company and having a group of pupils for each department. I was then going to give them a budget for each department. And throughout the lesson bring up some impromptu costs such as server failure resulting in new Controller card cost £xxx.xx etc. But I'm not sure how I can get this to work for a whole class. Any ideas on how I can plan something like this? TIA, its most appreciated.

If the configuration is the same as xp then you can specify the IME keyboard layout to apple Uk. The layout is installed as part of the bootcamp installation. In xp you can specify to use the Apple IME as the default for all users. Can you not do this in win7?

It really depends on the machines you have and whether they can be downgraded. Some of the older Macs cannot be downgraded as the older OS did not have the drivers. It just depends if the older version supports the hardware. Either way you will need the 10.6 disc to do so, unless you have an old 10.6 deploy studio image which you can roll out to test the client.

Snow Leopard still uses Rosetta for PowerPC applications. If you could install 10.6.8 on one of them it should be able to run. I've never used an RM network though so can't help with any of their stuff. Sorry.

Yeah the CALs is where I was coming from. But also from the services point of view that are (or were in the case on 10.7) on the OS X Server. They weren't Exchange killers but did the job. The mail service and calendar service allowed for as many users as you wanted with out additional cost. You could set one up for the pupils to use and it would be scaleable from a cost point of view. You could do this using Linux but as I mentioned earlier my skills just weren't up to the job configuring it all. You could do it on Windows but you would still need the licenses for each connection. If your users are like mine then getting them to use email was a major task and so given that the service is free to use then it wasn't such an expensive thing to run for 2 people.

I would also take a look at the potential of Thunderbolt drives. Remember that you can daisy chain a few together and still get the full 10Gb up and down across each connection. This is something else that I was considering but need to trial it first. In theory you could have 2 mac minis with 2 thunderbolt drives connected together one could be a mirror of the other while having both macs accessing the data across the connections.

Don't forget, if you decide to do something similar to Carter, with your users using external USB drives, you could always look at using External accounts. This allows for the users to carry their entire Home Dir on the External drive. With this method they can carry all their data with them and visit any mac in the room. They simply plug in their device and their account pops up on the login screen, allowing them to log in. If this is a viable option then maybe give it some thought. I would like to implement it here. It could simplify the entire process. Of course you do have the potential for lost/damaged drives. Not sure if they work with Networked accounts though, but it may be worth a look.

I was thinking more along the line of it being fully automated. I am downloading it now to have a look at it now.. I'm not a great coder by any sense of the word. I am just barely able to create a HTML page I can usually read a script well enough to allow me to cobble something together but thats about it. As we get pupils coming in throughout the year and get no warning of their arrival, when it comes to ICT they have no user account. This is the reason I was going to automate the process. So the scheduled task runs to create the nightly CSV file of any pupils added on roll that day and then once this has been created, to then manipulate the file to create a csv file to run into the vbscript, all without manual intervention. Is it possible to see your script PiqueABoo so as to give me an idea of what I would be looking to accomplish? Is your process completely automated too?

I saw a bicycle with a steering wheel. It did look funny.

Hello, I am looking for a way to create new user accounts. I have got a scheduled report that runs in Sims.Net that extracts the users added to the roll list for that day and creates a .csv file. Now, I need to use this CSV file to create a new file with the right output to feed into a script I already have to create users. The script that creates the users is a vbscript. I need to edit the name of the user to create the username, in the format of first name, first letter of the last name and a number (taken from their age on the system at registration time). An example: Joe Bloggs would be joeb6, but I think I can do this bit. I also need to create the home dir for OS X, but this I think I can do as well The issue is I'm not sure how to do this. Am I making this more difficult than it needs to be? How do you guys do it?

After reading with interest this thread: http://www.edugeek.net/forums/nix/89582-joli-os.html I thought I would break out these ancient devices to see if we can at least use them for something. However, Each time I run the install I get an error; plymouthd: ply-keyboard.c:384: ply_keyboard_watch_for_input: Assertion `keyboard != ((void *)0)' failed. I thought at first that it was simply not recognising the keyboard connected via the USB. Until I managed to get 2 screens into the installation using only the keyboard and then the error popped up. If I press the down arrow I get the little screens with the whizzing passed clouds. Press it again and I get the error. Has anyone else tried to install this OS on one of these machines? Or has anyone seen or resolved this error? Hope you can help. TIA.

Hmmm. I'll see how it goes. Could be a hand tool to just sit in the staff room as a quick email reader, booking system checker/booker.

This would be a tablet device though, so wondering about the input device such as pen recognition and the likes. Does Linux see the tablet devices as just a generic input or does it require certain drivers to be added? I'll still try an install to find out. These things have tiny amounts of ram though. About 256 mb if I remember right.

Does anyone know if this installs and runs well one the really old rm tablet machines? We have a couple I could use this on if all works well.

What do you mean by doesn't pull changes from the server? MCX preferences? or other changes? If MCX preferences, you could try running the mcxrefresh command for a user in terminal.

You can install the 10.7 server tools on a 10.7 client and connect to the 10.6 server using them. However, due to some changes in the tools you may run across some issues. Whether you can manage 10.7 clients through WGM though I'm not sure. I've not gone down the Lion route yet. I did try to use a mobile account on a client with an AD user and a 10.6.8 server. It worked but I had constant permission errors. This may have been down to the migration from a macbook to the iMac though. My advice would be to test it as you seem to be looking to do. I wouldn't touch the 10.6 WGM settings. They shouldn't matter.

Have you got the latest server admin tools as well? Sometimes the older ones won't work.

For me the biggest cost on saving was the licensing of OS X Server over the Windows counterpart. My Linux skills are very limited. Having the ability to use OpenSource technology with a reasonably simple GUI helped me get the best out of the hardware and software that we have at our disposal. Since MS's move to the EES licensing scheme, the cost to run MS software has reduced to now be at least competitive. With Exchange now being viable for a small school wishing to run their own Exchange server, there is no need to use Apple's mail service. We use OS X servers and their services wherever possible, but still retain the AD for users and Windows clients. I thought about removing AD from the mix as it is where most of my issues come from (AD-OD integration), but over the last 2 years things have been relatively smooth. Hardly have an issue where some users can't log in due to skewed times, resolved an issue where some users get the users cannot log in at this time. In short with the new licensing from MS, and Apple's client software now integrating so well with AD servers and exchange services, there really is no need to use an OD environment. Couple that with the ability to extend the AD schema to manage OS X Clients, it could potentially be better than the Magic Triangle. You could argue that you could do the same with Linux, but I think that it takes a very skilled administrator to be able to pull it off successfully, and a very knowledgeable person to fix any serious issues without resorting to a support contract. If you are going for the support contract I feel that you have already lost the main benefit of running Open Source. Just my ramblings.

We have Mango Data installed from Sherston. It seemed Ok but the school as far as Im aware has never used it. I have seen some staff do branching databases using Powerpoint/Keynote. Edit. Just noticed the forum. Mango Data is for Windows only as far as I'm aware.

Hello, I am trying to create a future ICT requirements document. As part of this I am listing items that need to be replaced or thought about now to save potential problems in the near future. Included in this is our OS. We currently still run Windows XP since it does all that we require at the moment. After using Win7 myself for a bit I can see how it could be beneficial for upgrade. However, since XP extended support doesn't end until 2014 (Microsoft Support Lifecycle), is there a rush to upgrade? I am trying to be realistic in the approach as we are only a small primary school. Because XP still has a bit of life in it, does that mean that software companies/vendors will support it for a while yet, or is it best to move on now rather than later. If we upgraded I think I would prefer to do it through the MS EES scheme.

I'm referring to the WGM folder redirections rather than website redirections. The WGM folder redirections allow you to redirect certain user home dir folders to a different locations. In the case of the caches folders, this tends to be redirected to the local drive so as to remove the need for unceccesary network traffic being created when browsing the web, this speeding up the experience and reducing traffic load.