Managed Client: managed Dock folders have incorrect behavior on Leopard

Folders added to the Dock on Leopard machines do not behave as stacks or folders.
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open Workgroup Manager.
2. Select a user object to manage.
3. Click the Preferences icon.
4. Click the Dock item in the Preferences management view.
5. Select Manage: Once
6. Add some folders to the User’s dock. (For example, /Applications and /Applications/Utilities)
7. [...]

MCX vs the screensaver (and Leopard!)

Enforcing a screensaver for security reasons has given me a lot of headaches over the years.
You’d think something as simple and basic as enforcing a screensaver would be easy. There have been plenty of hacks to do so. I developed one for 10.1 that I also used for 10.2 and 10.3. Later, [...]

Netbooting MacBook Air

I had assumed that the driver for the USB Ethernet adapter was loaded at boot time, and not available to EFI. This would mean that you would not be able to NetBoot using the USB Ethernet adapter.
I assumed wrong.
While I don’t yet have a MacBook Air-compatible NetBoot (or NetInstall) image, the MacBook Air does [...]

MCX, dslocal, and the Guest account

MacOSXHints has a hint on customizing the Dock for Leopard’s guest account.
This turns out to be yet another application of MCX records in the local directory service. The idea can be expanded to customize lots more things the Guest account can and cannot do – just use Workgroup Manager to manage preferences for the [...]

Managing Office 2008

If you are thinking about deploying Microsoft Office 2008 in your environment, there are some preferences you should consider managing.
Microsoft has provided a high-level overview here. But it’s short on details. Here’s a few…

Time Machine MenuExtra management

10.5.2 places a Time Machine menuextra in the menu bar for all users.
We’re not encouraging the use of Time Machine in our organization. I’ve removed it from the default dock, and am managing the preference to prevent Time Machine from asking if you want to use each new external disk for backups. [...]

MCX, dslocal, and radmind

In an earlier article about putting MCX data into the local DS store, I mentioned that I’m using radmind to deliver the pieces to each client machine. Here’s a little more detail on that.

Enforcing FileVault on local accounts

New in Leopard is the ability to protect an account with FileVault as it is being created. When creating a mobile account, you can check the box to use FileVault, and this setting is easy to enforce with Workgroup Manager’s preference management as part of the Mobility settings.
If you use the Accounts [...]

MCX, dslocal, and Leopard

Recently on the MacEnterprise mailing list, several of us were discussing putting MCX records into the local directory service. This is an appealing idea to me, because we don’t use Open Directory, and I’ve never wanted to spend the political capital to get our LDAP schema extended to support MCX, especially since I didn’t [...]

Leopard homeSync changes

I haven’t seen this discussed or documented anywhere, so I thought I’d better write this down so I don’t forget:
It appears that Apple has made an interesting change to the homeSync behavior in Leopard. Top-level directories in the home dir that begin with a dot (like “.netscape”) are synced at login and logout, but [...]