[MacMan]

Yeah Mac Book Sounds Like A Product Some B grade Computer company Would come Up with To Compete With A powerbook!

[MacMan]

This is a follow up regarding the above entry for a solution to slow logins:
I am a server admin in a Colorado school district. I got fed up with MCX managed preferences because of the huge login delay. Yet I still need to be able to restrict items like the dock and finder preferences.

I case you didn’t know, when a user has MCX prefs defined in their open directory user entry they get handled differently on the client side than an unmanaged user. The client reads this MCX entry from the open directory server and applies any managed attributes during login. This all happens via the program MCXCompositor. If you have ever looked at the syslog, MCXCompositor seems to be a bit error happy. The obvious solution would be to remove the MCXCompositor from the picture by turning off managed preferences. But if you are like me you don’t want little hands pulling items out of the dock every 3 seconds. Or you would rather not have the hard drive show up on the desktop.

I have written a simple AppleScript Studio application that pulls preferences from a master user (dock items, menu extras, finder properties. etc) and copies them to a selected group of users. It will also modify some preferences such as : locking the dock, running simple finder, or adding the home directory to the dock. All these preferences are selectable so that you can give users only a new dock or only menu extra items (eg monitors).

I currently have a few schools testing this software and experience login times of 5-10 seconds, even over wireless!

I would like to continue development and release a package that is fully functional (freeware obviously) but I would like to know if this is something that other server admins would be interested in. I would hate work hard creating something that no one will use. Reply and let me know or email [email protected].

Thanks,
Zach

[Author]

Posts