Managing dock with WGM

[cbrew325]

10.5.2 server OD/AD integration. My AD groups are a member of an equivalent OD group which has managed settings applied. I can’t seem to correctly manage a user’s dock. The managed settings get applied, but the user still gets their own dock items as well which they can remove and add to. The option for merge with user’s dock is unchecked. I know I could probably manage the whole com.apple.dock.plist file, but I am trying to avoid that. Any ideas? Maybe this is intended behavior, but it seems to me like the merge with user’s dock option doesn’t work as it should.

[jdyck]

I’m having the same problem, for whatever that’s worth. Seems like no matter what I do (even to the point of creating a Dock.plist file and putting it into the User Template file so that any new users automatically get that Dock) there are always a few extra apps showing up that aren’t in the WGM list – in my case it’s down to Time Machine and the Downloads folder. Haven’t been able to figure out how to get rid of them yet.

[cashxx]

This is probably your issue………get a copy of Property List Editor, usually comes with Apple Dev Tools.

Edit the following Files:
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dockfixup.plist
Go under like add-app and delete all the numbered items…..do the the same for the others like add-doc, etc.

/System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Default.plist
Go under persistent-apps and persisent-others and remove the numbered items like above.

Doing so should blank out the dock……you may want to blank out the dock pref file you added to your user template too.

After doing those the Dock should be fully, the way it should be, manageable using WGM.

Dan

[cbrew325]

Well, my OD servers and Clients are all at 10.5.4 now and I still haven’t gotten this to work correctly.

When I check the option for Merge with User’s Dock, I can see that the value for static-only in com.apple.dock becomes false. When I uncheck Merge with User’s Dock, static-only changes to true. Regardless, When I login as a user I get a managed dock that I can add and remove items from. Other settings are working as expected.

[cbrew325]

For what its worth, My 2 OD servers were upgraded from 10.4.11 to 10.5.2. They’ve since been updated to 10.5.3 and 10.5.4.

[cbrew325]

I figured out that /Library/Managed Preferences/username/com.apple.dock is getting created with the static-only key set to false. By unchecking Merge with User’s Dock this key should be set to true. I can work around it with the following script:

me=`finger |grep ” *con “|cut -d\ -f1`
defaults write /Library/Managed\ Preferences/”$me”/com.apple.dock ‘static-only’ -bool ‘TRUE’
chown root:admin /Library/Managed\ Preferences/”$me”/com.apple.dock.plist
chmod 644 /Library/Managed\ Preferences/”$me”/com.apple.dock.plist
killall Dock

[cbrew325]

To add some resolution to this post, I am running the following script as a login hook. This is working pretty well. The login hook runs the script as root, but the current user is passed as $1.

#! /bin/bash

me=$1
defaults write /Library/Managed\ Preferences/”$me”/com.apple.dock ‘static-only’ -bool ‘TRUE’
chown root:admin /Library/Managed\ Preferences/”$me”/com.apple.dock.plist
chmod 644 /Library/Managed\ Preferences/”$me”/com.apple.dock.plist
killall Dock

[cbrew325]

Hopefully this helps somebody:

The root of this problem is that the Active Directory Plugin has its own Dock MCX settings that take precedence over the ones assigned via OD Workgroup Manager. These settings are located in /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService/ActiveDirectory.plist

You can edit ActiveDirectory.plist to stop getting in the way of your managed MCX settings with the following command:

sudo /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “delete AD\ MCX\ Template:mcx_application_data:com.apple.dock” /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService/ActiveDirectory.plist

This is a recommended procedure from Apple Enterprise Support.

[Author]

Posts