Lab admin's secret weapon: Tips & Tricks for Mac Management

If you're the person responsible for Mac support in a big, cross-platform shop, it can sometimes feel like you're alone in the Windows wilderness. Established communities like AFP548.com (port 548 is reserved for the AppleShare Filing Protocol, hence the name) and MacEnterprise.org are critical resources for anyone who rides herd on a pride of Macs in a business or educational environment.

Hidden away among the postings and troubleshooting info are some true gems, including Apple engineer John DeTroye's "Tips and Tricks for Mac Management" PDF handbook. If you're trying to do anything with Workgroup Manager, you need this concise 116-page document, and you need it now.

JohnD's guide for workgroup and preference management -- particularly for implementing Portable Home Folders, where user data is cached and synchronized to a fileserver -- is so vital, it's linked from Apple's knowledge base article on Mac Manager. Along with Mike Bombich's deployment tips page and AFP548's AD/OD integration guide, it needs to be in the virtual library of every Mac manager. You can download the current version of the Tips and Tricks PDF here.

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Source: http://homepage.mac.com/JohnD

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Enterprise How-tos Education

If you're the person responsible for Mac support in a big, cross-platform shop, it can sometimes feel like you're alone in the Windows...

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JayB

I concur. DeTroye's guides rock. My only complaint is that they aren't prominently available to someone who is just starting out with Mac management. A few other sites that I have found helpful:
managingosx.wordpress.com & face.centosprime.com/macosxw/ (no affiliation to either).
Thanks for the post Michael!

August 06 2007 at 12:43 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Gerald Buckley

Leopard's very likely going to make multi-platform portable home folders a snap. There are a LOT of people who never made it to Tiger Server for these very reasons. Will be interesting to hear what you guys have to say in Q4 on the matter.

August 03 2007 at 3:00 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

jason mark

Thanks for this! As a small business with a single OSX Server, and 12 workstations, we're big enough that it's not easy, and small enough that it's not easy. Tips like this are greatly appreciated.

I also want to add that one of our *NIX geeks recently wrote an rsych script which runs every hour and pushes auto-updates to users machines. This keeps everyone on the same page. I'm not talking about Apple updates but instead things like:

* MacLorem
* Screen Rulers
* Quicksilver (so everyone doesn't have to update by hand)
* Some company-wide Applescripts that are useful for filing
* Some Entourage Applescripts which sync with our filemaker database
* Our standard normal.dot word template
* Omnigraffle stencils
* Color Palettes

It's such an amazing life-saver, and also makes new machine setup a breeze.