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Hi Our Performing Arts Centre have received a new high specced iMac predominantly for video editing. We have a small network of imacs but are predominantly Windows based. The existing macs are still able to be deployed/updated using Deploystudio but I believe this would not work with the new one. As this is only one Mac what would the best practice be for setting this up? Should I manually bind to the network etc, install Office, Sophos etc.. or is there a better more automated and secure way (withoiut too much of a learning curve)? Would it still link in with profile manager for drive and printer mappings? What would you recomend? Thanks

So since I put in a new server so that we could have an actual work network for the macs Ive had so many bugs to work through - random users getting 'library needs to repair to run applications', keychain login constantly popping up, etc... I've gotten to the stage that these bugs are no longer a problem, however log in times can be very long - anywhere from 3 minutes to half an hour... That's IF users manage to log on, sometimes they just aren't able to. According to the endless amount of forums on this topic, this could be due to a number of problems: DNS, TCP/IP Stack, struggle to talk to SMB... Can anyone shed any light into this? Please only respond with actual advice/solutions

Hey guys Just started a new job at a primary school in Kidderminster. They have around 100 iPads throughout the school and at the moments the kids are just using them as stand-alone devices that connect to the internet. I want them to talk to the network I have a Mac server and a Windows Domain Controller and was wondering whether or not it is possible for a student to turn on an iPad and it shows them a custom made page where they need to sign in with their user name and password which then can link each user to their own area. I was thinking of Tonido as this application dosen't just work with iPads but every mobile device? What you all reckon? Any help would be most appreciated. Alex

Over the past few months I've been looking at various methods of ways for our pupils to use both Windows and Mac networks within our school. At present we have a Music dept that has its own Open Directory setup - so pupils have a separate login for the Mac network, and centrally store of Home folders on a NAS. Separate to that, within the Art dept we have a number of macs that are connected to Active Directory allowing pupils to use their Windows network login. In that case, their mac home folders are local to the mac that they log into - not ideal! This also regularly causes keychain issues, particularly when the AD account password is changed. However, this does allow them to access their Windows home directory fairly easily. We have tried setting the Mac home directory to be the same as the Windows home folder, but this stops some applications from working (such as iPhoto) as they need an AFP formatted partition to work. Also, this doesn't seem to be generally recommended practice. So, how best to achieve what we need? In an ideal world we'd like both Windows and Mac networks to share a single login (we're pretty much tied to using AD for this) and have a single home folder that works on both OS's (including all required applications). OK, this is something that's pretty unattainable. So what's the best we can hope for? Two separate logins and passwords - one for Windows and one for Mac networks, each with its own centrally stored home folder (using NTFS and AFP respectively). We can live with this, but what our users would really like is to easily access their Windows home folder whilst logged onto the Mac network (the reverse isn't really required). Ideally we'd like to easily present the users Windows Home folder on the Mac doc when they log in - but with two lots of account credentials in play gives authentication issues. Of course users can save their AD credentials in their keychain when they access the Windows home folder for the first time, but it's a somewhat inelegant solution. I'm curious how others have their Windows / Mac networks living together in a school environment. Has anyone come up with a magic solution that works really well for them? Cheers, LSDWho

Hi All I am in the process of setting up a new mac network (for the first time) and on testing the profiles I accidentally installed a restricted profile onto my local admin account. This has now locked me out of such settings as network & profiles. Does anyone know of a way that I can remove this profile from my local admin account even though I can not access the profiles setting when logged in as the local admin. I would very much appreciate anyones help on this. Cheers Josh

Hi all Just wondering if anyone could help with an ongoing issue that we are scratching our heads over. We are a college using about 270 Apple Mac’s on an Active Directory network with Windows 2016 servers and Adobe products. The issues that we had going from Xyratex servers to Windows Server 2016 is that we had to use Acronis Files Connect for AFP connections. Since we made the move to this we've had our file servers hitting the ceiling with high CPU usage when students in Media are transferring their files over. We've stated that students should not be working on their Adobe CC products in accordance with Adobe's recommendations. So when we have several classes all moving their Premier Pro, Photoshop, etc files over to their scratch the files servers that's when the Acronis Files Connect CPU usage hits the roof. Acronis have identified a 'bug' in their software that causes high CPU usage and have recommended a downgrade. Is any other colleges experiencing similar issues and is there another way of working, i.e. using newest version of SMB ver 3? Hope that makes sense! Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you

Hi Guys, We have around 30 Macs on Site, alongside a Mac Server Mini running OSx 10.75... Obviously this needs upgrading, and I have a couple of concerns.. Will I have to reconfigure the server/user settings once upgraded? Or will it retain all the settings in terms of server side? Which version in terms of hosting the server software is most stable? El Capitan? Or should we hold off and go to Yosemite? Cheers! Rowan

So I've recently got a network up and running for our macs. They are using a Windows Server 2008. I have an issue with some of the student accounts - they keep getting a message saying "OSX Need to Repair Library to Launch Applications". I'm given 2 options, cancel or repair. I have to put in admin username and pass to be able to click repair. No matter which option I choose, the message comes back a few seconds later. I have found that it is only happening with certain users, not the mac itself. I've ran disk utility to check permissions, everything is fine. Any idea what is causing this?

Hi Guys, Our Mac Pro server recently failed because of a security update (No back-up, lesson well and truly learned). Before I had our network set-up with 23 client macs binded to OD and was using Deploy Studio to set them up from a Monolithic image. The users had been set up with local home folders. I rebuilt the server but now its causing issues with the local profiles. I'm still relatively new to Mac Administraion and I want to take the time now to rebuild the network completely. This time I'm going to try using thin imaging and have some questions. Local profiles - Before I had used local profiles because I had read iMovie doesn't play nice with Network folders. Is this still the case? I only have 4tb of network space to accommodate 100ish users. Would it be feasible for me to even set up Network profiles? iMovie/Garageband - When I set up the clients I need to install iM/GB + the loops etc.. Can I download this to the server and send it out to the clients instead of downloading on each machine individually? TimeMachine/Backup - What is the best way to back-up the pupils work? TimeMachine or something like CCCloner? Shared Folders - How do I mount sharepoints to the dock depending on the user group? Anyone got any good guides for Profile Manager? Anti-Virus/Malware - What solutions do you use? Any free ones? Homepage - How do I get Safari to open on login to a specific webpage? Thanks guys, any brief overview on how you do those things would help me immensely. C