Category Archives: Management

Change Directory Service Search Paths Using ARD

Part of my post imaging process requires me to manually adjust the custom authentication search policy in Directory Utility. Since all of my users and groups live in Active Directory, we want the machine to look first in AD for a user when they enter their log in credentials by having a custom search policy for authentication where AD is above LDAP. I’ve always wanted a way to either script this out, or use ARD to send a command to do this, instead of manually logging in to each machine after it’s been restored and adjusting this via drag and drop.

When I started using DeployStudio a few years ago, I was hopeful this would find its way in to their AD Bind task. Since I’m still waiting for this to happen, I decided I would beat them to it. (more…)

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Use The Terminal to Setup Apple Remote Desktop Computer Info #1

UPDATED: Since this writing, I’ve switched from Mike Bombich’s NetRestore, to DeployStudio.  DeployStudio offers the ability to populate all 4 computer info fields after restoring an image, as part of an imaging workflow.  I highly recommend DeployStudio for system imaging.  Occasionally, I still use the method outlined below to tweak these fields. Part of my […]

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How To: Run Lego Education’s WeDo software on OS X 10.4.11

legologoI realize the topic of this post may be a bit specialized, but I would surely have liked to had something like this as a guide when I recently had to overcome this challenge.

Most of our entire campus is still running OS X 10.4.11, for the sole reason that login times for a .local Active Directory domain STILL take 2-3 minutes (as of 10.5.6).  Our Lower School purchased some Lego robotics kits which came with new software called WeDo.  The minimum requirements are OS X 10.5, and the installer will not run on OS X 10.4.

To get around this, I did the following: (more…)

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Another Way to Kill Dashboard at Login for Managed Users

I love Dashboard, I have several widgets I can’t live without.  Most of my users however, don’t even know what it is.  I also love the Mighty Mouse but again, most of my users don’t understand how it works.

I’ve tried managing the mouse preferences to prevent Dashboard from opening when users click the scroll ball, but I can’t seem to get it to work for the life of me.  The same applies to disabling the Dashboard application and all accompanying applications through Workgroup Manager.

I came across DashOff, an application for enabling and disabling Dashboard, but it requires user interaction and I want this to be automated.  I finally gave up and decided to create an Applescript application called KillDash to run at login, to issue a “defaults write” command to disable dashboard.

(more…)

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