locking down LAB G5

G

greenbmicro

Registered
Here's my situation,


I have been administering Windows based PC's for a while and have recently acquired some MACs. I will be setting up a few G5 towers for a lab and I need to know how I can customize and lock down some settings. I want to make a standard DOCK for all users that logon. I will be locking it down so that changes cannot be made to the DOCK. In Windows I would copy a locked down profile to the default users profile and end of story, not finding that to be the case with MACs. I'm running MAC OS X on all the G5's.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks
 
When you first setup the Macs, you'll be creating an Admin account on them. Then once you've done that and you're logged in, create an account for the limited access users by going to the Apple Menu > System Preferences > Accounts. While you're creating the account, you'll notice a tab called "Parental Controls". In there you can set up all kinds of limits for the account.
 
I don't believe you can control the Dock settings in there, but you could lock the doc preferences so that they cannot be changed. Find the file limited user home folder > Library > Preferences > com.apple.dock.plist and change it's permissions to read-only.

If you really want super-fine controls over users, you would want to look into implementing a Mac OS X Server setup.
 
Thanks, this will help in locking down some settings however, the problem I'm running into is that the users logging into the G5 will be network users. So those accounts will not appear in the accounts menu in system preferences. I did create a generic limited account, but is there any way to make sure everyone that logs onto that machine with their network ID has the same limited access, etc as the limited account?
 
On the contrary, if you are connecting to a Mac remotely, the only way you can connect is to log in as a user that exists on the Mac that you are connecting to OR to connect as a very limited "guest".
 
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