Before going down the path of purchasing third party solutions to manage your systems and/or firewalling your Macintosh population off from the rest of your network like they're some redheaded stepchild (no offense to Matt and our other redheaded colleagues!), take a look through Apple's documentation for 10.6 server. Yes, we're on Lion now, and many things have changed, but the 10.6 docs are more robust and complete. You should also take a look at the following Apple White Paper on managing 10.5 machines (again, it's changed a bit but the foundation is still there):
http://images.apple.com/education/docs/Apple-ClientManagementWhitePaper.pdf Historically, MCX is the basis for a lot of the configuration of the Mac. In Lion there's a tool called "Profile Manager." Reading up on the historical MCX stuff, Open Directory integration, and the new Profile manager should help a lot. http://www.apple.com/support/lionserver/profilemanager/ Another good resource is Google's Macintosh Operations Team. They're on Google+ and have released a number of the tools they use as open source. Main Page: https://plus.google.com/113021614344742332063/posts Announcement with links to the tools they use: https://plus.google.com/u/0/109088229817689076273/posts/M3zHnfEQMUw Those links and terms should give you a great headstart and figuring out what it is you need to do to get things humming along nicely. Gil @boyonwheels On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Tim Kirby <[email protected]> wrote: > Much to my surprise and contrary to many years of prior stance > to the contrary, a "fast track" project has appeared at $WORK > with a view to "supporting" Mac laptops as an alternative to > the Dell windows systems - certain area, in particular in > engineering, have seen a proliferation of people bringing in > their own systems and I guess there's a sense that the powers > that be would rather provide and support $WORK owned machines > than have a network full of home boxes. Things such as cost > and the like are understood and will be factored in so when > managers sign up for employees to have such machines they will > know the impact on their budget... > > The more interesting aspect is what constitutes "support"; > the windows guys perspective they wax lyrical about group > policies, imaging systems etc. etc. ... which leads me to > ask whether any of this body have any useful experience in > "managing" such machines. I'm open to pointers to useful > resources, but I'm particularly interested in anyone who is > actually "doing" this at some level. > > And offline responses are fine if you don't want to admit > to it in public :) > > TIA > > Tim > > ps. I actually use a MacBook Pro and know it well - I just > haven't spent much time looking at the enterprise > solutions out there and don't have much time to do the > legwork, hence I'm reaching out to the community... > -- > Tim Kirby [email protected] > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Tech mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
