[M@]

First, the spam filter on this forum is horrid. I’ve tried posting unsuccessfully several times and can’t for the life of me figure out what’s triggering it. I think it has to do with the fact that I only have one post.

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: eekaboig[/u][p][b]ps-what we are trying to achieve is
password expiration notifications and the ability to change it on the domain[/b]
[/QUOTE]

Our University uses alternative methods for this — a website with a form combined with an e-mail notification. I can check on this for you if you’re interested.

[b]network printer mapping[/b]

Last time I checked, MacOS saved the user’s AD password in a plaintext file on the machine. While you have to have admin access to the machine, we consider this too insecure. We map directly to the printer — you could script this to happen at login.

[b]network drive mapping using dfs (users have three drives associated with their id’s)[/b]

We pick one of our three DFS servers to point Macs at — if that server goes down, then we have to point the users elsewhere, but they’re identical and only one character changes in the name. That server share also contains the development and production webserver shares so that makes it less complicated.

[b]use of network drives on and off campus-90% of our mac users are on a laptop
[/b]
Via VPN first, I’d imagine? MacOS works great with Microsoft’s VPN.

[b]inventory and software concurrent licensing but i am hopeful with caspers recon and their new sccm plugin…[/b]

We actually use OCS-Inventory (the price is right) and Apple Remote Desktop for patching. For concurrent licensing, Sassafras K2 is supported at the University level, but it’s somewhat of a nightmare when it screws up, and the interface is so complex that it’s difficult to figure out the most often question: “who has what licenses checked out where?!?” (causing user X to get a license denied message)…

[M@]

It is a very good move to wait, and I would recommend waiting until the following problem is fixed:

http://www.macwindows.com/snowleopard-filesharing.html

Apple has introduced a fairly annoying bug in the Finder with how it interacts with Windows Fileservers — you cannot copy a file up to the server without getting an error message (the file in fact does copy, but the error prevents you from copying more than one file at a time). Microsoft Office also cannot save over files opened directly from the fileserver (“Save-As” to another filename does work, as does saving to your desktop and then copying back up to the fileserver).

Further, this error occurs only for non-administrators on the FileServer so unless you test as an account without “Full Control” enabled you won’t see it…

Hopefully they’ll get it resolved in 10.6.3

The work-around is to copy the files via the Terminal:

[code] “cp -R” drag file/folder you wish to copy to the terminal ” ” drag the file/folder you want to copy TO on the server[/code]

(dragging the folders on top of the terminal auto-types the path for you).

As far as the Microsoft Office bug (2008), you just save it locally or save it to the server as a different filename.

[M@]

This apparently was caused by the system I was building on … I did a clean setup on another machine and did the same test ( base OS, 10.5.7 Combo only ) and it restored / booted just fine on my test box. Perhaps there’s a problem with doing builds when booted from an external drive? My ( apparently bad ) build / test procedure was to boot from the external FW drive, do my dmg build, apply it to the internal drive, and boot from internal drive to test.

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