Default Dock icons

J

Johnny Sausage

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We are currently in the process of integrating our G5s with our AD domain. We have an OS X server that will apply policy settings (restrict changing system preferences, placing certain icons in the dock, etc) All users will login to the Macs using AD domain accounts. One of the problems I have noticed is that when a user logs on to a Mac for the 1st time, they receive the default dock icons (itunes, ichat, etc) as long with the icons we specified with on our OSX server. Is there a way to modify\or remove the default icons permanently?
 
User Defaults are in /System/Library/User Template/

I am on a Mac that I don't have admin rights to right now so I can't look through those folders, but it is my understanding that when a User is created, those templates are coppied to their home directory. I don't know if the default dock is in there or not. If it is, you could replace it and then they would start out with whatever dock you put in there.

You could also try doing sudo find /System -name "com.apple.dock.plist" to see if it is saved anywhere, I have a feeling that the preference list might be created on the first time the dock launches for a user.
 
I just found it, If you go to /System/Library/CoreServices/ and then control click on Dock.app and select Show Package Contents, then go to Contents/Resources/English.lproj

The default dock setting is called default.plist, I bet if you athenticated and replaced it with your own it would work.

This of course would only work assuming that you are using imaging to deploy your OS, i don't know how you could do this otherwise.
 
I found the file, but replacing it with a modified version causes dock problems when network users logon. They do not get their dock settings from the OS X server. I will try to edit the plist in a text editor and remove the persistent dock items.
 
If you had an Open Directory server to supplement the AD schema, you could do this with MCX settings. If not, either edit the plist file, or you could try creating the Dock you want and simply coping that plist file to your users. If you want this to be pretty static, put the plist file in /Users/Shared and create a login item script that will take that plist and replace the one that's created for the users.
 
Did you make sure that you set the permissions to what they were?

BTW thanks for asking this question, I used to use a script to copy over the dock that i wanted after imaging, I dont know why I didn't think of this before.
 
If you have an OD Master, you can set up managed preferences for your users. You'd open up Workgroup Manager and set up your settings as you like. You'd have to add a second authentication node to Directory Access on the clients pointing to your OD server. You'll want the AD node to be first and the OD node to be after it in the list.

Note, preferences that are lists, like Dock items, may simply append your data to the default data. So you might get the default dock + all the extra icons you want as well. This will happen quite often. Items that are not 'list' based will take the data you give it as the only way to display or behave.

Let me know if you have any other questions! :)
 
Go3iverson, I am already using my OD server to add items to the dock once a user authenticates. The only problem is that it adds the items I choose in addition to the default dock items. I do not want the default dock items at all and would like to remove them completely. Is there a simple way to do this via the OD server or should I just edit the default.plist manually ?
 
Yeah, that tends to be the behavior of list based preferences, when using MCX. I haven't had a chance to test it out with Tiger Server yet, though I hope to later this week.

Well, you could still do it with a managed login item, that copies that plist for you to the user's preferences, if you only want those items to ever be in the dock for them. For simplicity, you could use ARD 2 to copy out that plist to your client machines and point the script to that directory.

Sorry that I don't have a better solution for ya! :)
 
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