Mac Lab Administration

[UHCoog]

Hello. I am not new to Apples or Mac OS X but I am new to the whole UNIX system. I work in a Mac lab on a college campus and it seems as if we are having problems with user preferences. For example, when a student logs into their account which is on a server, they have their specific home folders and everything. They are able to save documents and other things. Also they are able to change their background and screen saver and add icons to their dock. But when they log out and move to a different computer within the lab, none of the dock preferences are saved. Also another strange thing that occurs is when you log in under an administrative account, every program works perfectly. But when a student logs in, for example, Adobe InDesign will instantly have an unexpected crash. And a few other applications run in to problems when a student logs in. We are going to great lengths to solve this problem before the Fall semester begins. If anyone has any ideas or has faced this problem before, please help! It would be greatly appreciated.

 

[skoggis]

The cause of the preferences not "sticking" is that they are saved in ByHost folder in your Library->preferences. And these preferences are hardware specific files -> Different computer cannot use another computers files and so it has to recreate them. Solution is to have a script to change these preference files on login.

Check the script at macosxlabs.org:

http://www.macosxlabs.org/tools_and_scripts/script_archive/script_archive.html#login

I've got some good info about lab management from macosxlabs.org

http://www.macosxlabs.org

Don't know anything about those apps crashing. I also work in an university as an adp designer and we have a lab with 11 G4 MDD's and one xserve. Everything works very fine...

Good luck to you

 

[UHCoog]

Thank you for the references. We have tried these as well, but to no avail things remain the same. Maybe it's something within our ByHost folder that is preventing us from having success.