Managed preferences Login Items

[philletourneau]

Hello Ya’ll, here’s the scoop.

Running 10.3.9 server ODM, with a bunch of 10.3.4-10.3.9 workstations, users have remote home folders on the server.

I am implementing iHook, for scripted preferences. Every machine has iHook installed no problem. Now, the files (preferences) I will be copying to their stations are on the server, along with the .ihook scripts.

Here’s an idea of how it’s setup, home folders are on the server as:
/Shared Items/ProUsers/myusername

I made a hidden folder called .managedprefs on the root of the user home folders like so:
/Shared Items/ProUsers/.managedprefs
with folders like
/Shared Items/ProUsers/.managedprefs/prefs/defaultquarkprefs
and scripts like
/Shared Items/ProUsers/.managedprefs/pushprefs.ihook

The ONLY problem with all this, is that in the workgroup manager, with a user selected, under Preferences / Login / Login Items
I set “Manage these settings” -> Always
then in “Open these items automatically when the user logs in”
from the server, I just drag my .ihook file onto there.

HEREIN LIES THE PROBLEM

users logging in are not launching that file, I have a suspicion that OS X can’t find the file, because the path might be different on the server than it is on the workstation. When I drag the ihook file into place on the workstation itself, the ihook file launches fine.

[andrina]

If you suspect the problem to be related to the path, why not use workgroup manager on a workstation to connect to the server as all these files in then in the correct location to stipulate the startup item?

[philletourneau]

I was successful making it work by dragging the script into the workgroup manager from a workstation.

This is not an IDEAL solution, but at least it works. I’d like to get the official word about how this particular function works.

Phil.

[andrina]

If you’re looking to do this from the server then, it’s going to be a bit of a less intuitive way of doing this, Workgroup Manager is just finding the path to an item from where you’ve shown it it exists, if you want to change this, it will mean a bit of manual editing. While you can enable the advanced inspector in Workgroup Manager, I actually prefer a Java app called LDAP Browser for this kind of thing however. As it appears you’re managing your prefs by user this is not going to be a fun task to do manually, so look into scripting the changes (probably using dscl quite heavily). Anyway, with LDAP Browser, you’ll be able to take a look into your user and their apple-mcxsettings, and find the key and string that applies to you.

None of this is a particularly neat way of doing this, and I’ve run into similar issues in the past when trying to allow non-standard preference panes in a managed preference environment…

In the end I don’t actually use Server Admin, or Workgroup Manager all that much on my servers directly, and just use my own workstation which does have a similar environment to the rest of the workstations in the building.

[philletourneau]

I’m using managed preferences on the group that applies to my users at the moment, I will be rolling out individual preferences to various users once I iron out the bugs with this setup.

Another weird thing that has happened to some users is that they’ll login, and get a window that says “select which hook to run” which is the window you get by simply launching ihook directly with no .hook file.

This is very strange because the only entry in their managed prefs in WGM is an actual .HOOK file, if the file is missing nothing happens, but now some users are reporting this window.

[Author]

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