Afternoon Nate! Thanks for your speedy reply as always 🙂

1) It is a standard installation package. However, the activation i think is machine specific maybe…which is probably why creating an activation package on my loadset machine via Composer doesn’t seem to affect the lab machines. I contacted Telestream regarding the fact that they’re basically expecting me to manually activate 125 machines and their response was more or less ‘sorry, you have to if you wanna use our software’. Needless to say, my response was a bit more agitated but ah..such is the life of a sysadmin…

2) I will definitely look into Firefox CCK! I’ve been doing the previous method which is a pain whenever a new version is released so this is huge – thanks!

3) I agree – the only time I’ve noticed the error is when I’m ‘testing’ the machine and opening up, for example, Excel, Word, and Powerpoint simultaneously. But I guess most users don’t really do that so I’m not too concerned…hopefully 2011 is a little more friendly when it comes to this level of customization. So #3 I’m going to ignore – no reason trying to fix something that’ll only get replaced with a new workflow come the next Office.

As a #4 (or maybe I should just stick this in it’s own thread), is there anyway to references to DVD Templates (DVD Studio Pro) or Sound Files (Logic Studio) on a server location? I hate the fact that my loadset is almost 90GBs because of these uncompressed audio clips that a majority of people don’t even use…pushing it off to a network share and using symbolic links to reference it would be more than ideal. I figured out that without all the unnecessary fluff, my loadset could shrink down to almost 40GBs which could be reloaded in 15 minutes versus the current 45 minutes.

My next target is to use a purely network user home directory…however, given the fact that most of our users store GBs of data at a time, we would need to either A) have really REALLY fast network storage or B) exclude anything over a certain file size from transferring with the user’s profile. I know I’ve seen that done before but without something to limit the size of files being uploaded to a centralized server, we would experience severe network congestion which would make video editing painful.

Thanks again for any advice you can give!
B

Ok – I have some progress on the 3 items.

1) The activation process is purely manual. It calls home, receives some kind of confirmation that the license is valid and in the right quantity, and then changes something on the local machine that activates it. The installation package installs just the application and does nothing with the activation. I tried to just use Composer to capture the activation process, but it doesn’t seem to work between different machines (most likely machine specific changes are made). So activation is manual and Telestream doesn’t seem to want to budge from that…

2) I just made a couple xpi’s using Mozilla CCK and it’s awesome! My only gripe is that I can’t seem to remove the default bookmarks such as “Most recent”, “Getting Started”, and “Latest Headlines”. But that aside, it does everything I need to do globally so I can finally upgrade freely without reservation.

4) The image size is definitely going to be the next big thing for us. I’ll play with some linking and see if we can get away from such a large ‘full’ image.

I’ll take a look at Munki and see if it’s something we can use – ideally, we would use Instadmg to create the initial image and then run something like Radmind to maintain it.

Thanks!
B

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: dead2sin[/u][p]I think munki is a much cleaner way of doing stuff over Radmind. Radmind isn’t bad, but I think munki is slightly better.

Nate[/p][/QUOTE]

That’s actually very encouraging. Do you use munki along with Workgroup Manager? Currently, I’m using WGM for just the bare minimums such as Software Update server, various gui featured customizations, machine names, and printer drivers.

I honestly wouldn’t mind a Netboot scenario except for the large user file sizes and the lack of persistent shadow caches.