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You're treating UNIX not as a trademark defended by the Open Group, nor a history relating to things directly derived from the Bell Labs or the UC Berkeley sources (yes, I did try to give credit to the userland that was based on a BSD.), but rather a philosophy. Fair enough. But if the kernel lineage doesn't matter, then my assertion of NT Kernel + Cygwin (derived from GNU sources, surely close to UNIX in philosophy, yes?) rings true.

But you get marked "Informative" while I get marked "Troll".

If you have doubts that Apple's got need for extra support for HFS+ metadata, go ask the RsyncX folks why they keep on releasing. If you doubt my claim that metadata got glommed on to the standard unix utils, go use 10.1 and watch all your resource forks fail. Academic bonus points if you were to diff the bsd source (you know, unix?) and the darwin source. ls is easy, right? Should work on most standard *nix systems, right? So go grab the source from freebsd or gnu and compile 'em on mac and tell me they've not done anything. Please. Prove me wrong.

You're informative, I'm the troll, right? Here's your chance to shine.

Maybe you should read up a bit on Mac solutions before you comment- software like Apple Remote Desktop, FileWave, NetOctopus, NetBoot/NetRestore, Radmind, HP OpenView, Deep Freeze and resources like AFP548, Mac Managers, MacOSX Labs, MacEnterprise, and of course Apple itself (I'll leave finding Apple's website as an exercise for the reader ;) make running large Macintosh installations fairly easy. There are plenty of UNIX/CLI tools and scripts out there, and Apple offers professional certifications if you want paper to show a potential employer.

FontAgent Pro is the best font application out there for OSX. It performs reasonably well up to about 10000 fonts. after that, it starts to choke, when loading (primarily because it has an option to compare font metrics to determine exact duplicates).

as for merging, that's possible using a great commandline utility called rsync that comes with OSX, albeit, I think you need to install the developer tools to get access to that. Apple's rsync is broken for some things, since it doesn't preserve dates, but there's a fix called rsyncx that works great.

I don't see why someone couldn't make a contextual menu module (CMM) front-end for rsync integration in the Finder. that'd be badass.

You set up your permissions in advance. All I'm saying is that Apple provides all the software to do, in some way or another, everything Deep Freeze does. And chances are the price of "included" is better than some kind of per seat licensing scheme for 3rd party software. Not to mention there are many free tools to also assist in achieving parity.

http://www.macenterprise.org/ is a site that has developed over the years from the roots of macosxlabs.org into something with all sorts of advice on how to manage Mac OS X in different environments. For a lab take, look back to their archives. http://archive.macosxlabs.org/

I'm way too late for anyone to read this, but...

rsync is available for the mac. clicky

While interesting, I would suggest that you look at Apple centric boards for resolution of this kind of question. How many Slashdotters know or care? Here's some examples:

• AFP 548
• OS X Enterprise
• Apple's Server mailing list,this question is right up that alley.
• X server boards on Apple's website
• Apple's PDF on Open Directory Administration.

You might also consider a Server Support agreement from Apple; they can help with this kind of integration. Sure, it costs; but then you didn't think that we'd do your job for you either, right? And I believe that you could get this kind of support for the cheapest plan: $5995, and even have a few more calls left over for the rest of the year.

Because if the group doing the integrating decides you dont need it, you dont get it.

Unless the group doing the integrating decides, on a lark, to join, embrace, and even contribute to the open standard/software movement. 'Cause then you might be able to still decide what you want or need.

But that couldn't possibly come from some over priced, consumer-electronic excuse for a computer, now could it? No way.

Just keep doing yer thing, man...

The latest Security Update has (predictably) broken my rsyncX install. I was able to fix this by overwriting /usr/bin/rsync (Apple's rsync) with /usr/local/bin/rsync (which is where rsyncX installs by default). However, be sure to RTF-security information first the version of rsync that rsyncX uses (2.6.0) is not secure in daemon mode (use SSH mode instead).

I use the rsync available here because it includes support for HFS+ volumes, meaning it will preserve resource forks. It installs to /usr/local/bin so it doesn't overwrite the existing rsync at /usr/bin. You need to have it installed on all OS X machines that you are syncing between.

To rsync data that includes files with resource forks from a remote server to a local server via ssh, use something like this:

/usr/local/bin/rsync -ave ssh --delete --eahfs --rsync-path=/usr/local/bin/rsync \
<user>@<remoteserver>:<path> <localpath>

The --eahfs switch is what tells it to preserve resource forks.

Quote from article: "Noting the prevalent use of pen and paper by audience members, Ballmer wondered aloud why the content of his speech was not being captured and translated automatically, while also being synchronized with real-time video and a copy of his Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Advances in software in coming years would make such features practical, making "information workers" and those in fast-growing fields like healthcare more productive, he said." Dare to dream, Ballmer: Someday...

macosxlabs.org has articles and whatnot about this, i believe

macosxlabs.org has articles and whatnot about this, i believe

macosxlabs.org has articles and whatnot about this, i believe

I haven't really spent time with NetRestore, but it just is an easy wrapper for Apple Software Restore. ASR can do block copies instead of file level copies but I don't know if NetRestore defaults to using that. 'man asr' might be useful, since you can really just skip the netrestore stuff once you know what is it wrapping.

Mac OS X Server includes a netinstall feature, though it really just netboots clients off an install image. I think there is supposed to be an 'unmanaged' install feature, though I haven't actually poked around with it. I expect since it uses Apple's Installer it might be slow too, since the installer definitely uses file level copies, and also requires everything you install be in the proper package format.

I would recommend poking around macosxlabs.org. They are probably the best info. source on the web for deploying OS X in Hi-Ed labs. They have info on radmind and other common imaging scenarios.

macosxlabs has articles and whatnot about this, i believe:

I'm the systems administrator for a university library. To provide computing for our patrons we use a mixture of Dells running Windows 2000, iMacs with OS X, and Linux machines running LTSP.

Windows can be made very secure, but it takes a lot of time to learn how to set it up properly. Over time i've accumulated lots of small utilities to aid in the task, as well as written several scripts of my own. Besides locking the system down as much as possible, i have a script that runs weekly which uses Norton Ghost to re-image the hard drive.

Macs can also be made very secure. Again, over time i've written scripts to do much of the work on new installs. Here's some URLs to get you started: macosxlabs macosxhints bombich Finally, there is Linux. These are my favorite machines because the administration time required is almost 0. We are running Linux Terminal Server Project with hardware purchased from DisklessWorkstations.com. The machines do not have write access to the server that they boot from, so nothing can get screwed up. If anything happens to a machine, we just have to reset it and a minute later it is back to normal. Setting up the first terminal took some work because i was not familiar with network booting or running an operating system from read-only media (a read-only nfs share in this case), but once the first one is set up, adding additional units is trivial. In our setup the applications actually run on the diskless station, but it is more common to run applications on the server and have them display on the diskless station. If you wanted to go that route, you'd want to spend some money on a nice server, but it should work well. I've actually been thinking of buying a better server and trying to run applications on it and eventually trying to move all computing to Linux.

Macs just can't do this. Every time a Mac is acting funky, we need to spend several hours of our valuable IT time redoing it and reinstalling apps.

Yes, they can.

Macs just can't do this. Every time a Mac is acting funky, we need to spend several hours of our valuable IT time redoing it and reinstalling apps.

Yes, they can.

How to set up a Mac as a Kiosk. Very informative!

Look at Mac OS X Labs. They have a lot of experience in setting up machines in school labs (read: hostile environments).

If anyone would have info on locking down a system they would.

This pdf link. It tells you how to restore a dummy user's home directory after each login (Its for OSX, not sure if the grape can handle that or not).

Aside from some software tweaking and installation, this should really help your setup.

You're essentially looking to do the same thing many, many others have already done, and are doing every day, with Mac OS X in public lab-type environments. Do yourself a favor and visit

http://macosxlabs.org/

...particularly the documentation section.

You're essentially looking to do the same thing many, many others have already done, and are doing every day, with Mac OS X in public lab-type environments. Do yourself a favor and visit

http://macosxlabs.org/

...particularly the documentation section.

As I mentioned in an earlier post be very careful with some of the copying/archiving utilities that come with Mac OS X. Many of them are not intended to copy Mac files, these utilities often strip metadata and resource forks and end up ruining files.

Instead you need to use alternate tools included with Mac OS X such as ditto, CpMac, and hdiutil. There are also 3rd party utilities such as the tar replacement hfstar (located at the bottom of the page), and the rsync replacement RsyncX.

Its free, its pretty simple, and it works fast.

the default rsync included with OS X isn't aware of resource forks at all...

RSyncX will copy resource forks, but only to another OS X system running RSyncX with a HFS(+) filesystem.

Veritas makes a client for Backup Exec 9 for Mac OS X (you still need to be running Backup Exec on a Windows or NetWare box). There are also dozens of open source & freeware backup solutions that provide schedulable GUI frontends to command line staples like ditto, psync, and rsync, such as Carbon Copy Cloner and RsyncX.

Plus I really haven't heard ANY voices about "kiosks" running on MacOS :)

we're getting a bit off topic, but here's a site with info on Mac kiosks.

Like a lot of people here, I would tell iBooks are the best choice because of functionalities:
- Clean OS with simple use and easy adoption by "non-computer-friendly" people (I believe not all the kids love computers)
- Powerful way of limiting some harmful use (even improved on Panther), with clear experience from schools specialists (macosxlabs for example) and from Apple
- All the basic tools necessary for class/fun are included and some other can be found for free on apple.com.

But robustness is also and important issue in the hands of kids. Basically my experience with Dell computers is clearly not as happy as with Apple's ones.

I imagine the cost is an important matter at this scale and Dell can really go low on big quantities, but Apple proved to be able to. On that specific "price" field, I recently searched for a small (second) computer and compared iBook to Dell (and some others, but those 2 arrived in short list) and I realized that the world had changed and, for my needs, Apple was cheaper than Dell!
So perhaps is it the time to say, like in Virginia (G5), that Apple is the choice on the price...

At our school, we have developed an ad hoc solution with ASR (Apple Software Restore), it comes in 10.2 (client): try "man asr" on the command line.

ASR is damned fast ! We restore from scratch 2Gb system disks in 5 minutes. The image file is stored on a standard AppleShare server (100 Mbit/s switch). The speed is due to ASR ability to restore using block level disk access instead of file level, and from compressed images so less data has to travel on the network.

Each client has 2 partitions: one of them has a minimal system so we can boot on it when we want to restore the "main" partition. Everything is done automatically with ssh.

Here's hoping you see this message in time, the morning of Tuesday May 20th Apple is hosting an interactive webcast on using Apple Software Restore.

Another good resource is Mac OS X Labs. Full of good information about this sort of stuff.

YMMV. Good luck.

From their site:

Welcome to the web site for the Higher Education Mac OS X Lab Deployment Initiative. Our goal is to simplify the task of installing and maintaining Mac OS X in a computer lab. We will find and document solutions to a host of challenges that commonly arise when deploying labs in a higher education environment. The result will be a roadmap for others to use as they plan to roll out Mac OS X at their institutions.

Yes, rsync is the dog's.

On the Mac, I use RsyncX, which knows about resource forks, even when transferring them to systems which don't have them.

And on Windows, I use rsync again.

I've tried every damn sync program for the Mac. I've tried tar and dump on UNIX. I've tried fancy network backup tools. I've not found anything that compares with rsync.

I hate the complexity of the command-line syntax, but it has the required functionality:

1. Automatically incremental.
2. Works locally from disk to disk or across a network.
3. Works via secure VPN or SSH.
4. Works between any two platforms I happen to be using, so I can back up to wherever the spare disk space is.
5. Easily scriptable, easily scheduled.
6. More efficient at using network bandwidth than any other protocol I've found.
7. Doesn't fail over on systems with incorrect system clocks or bad timestamps.
8. Data ends up in original native format, not some format that needs a special program to read.
9. Partial restore is trivial.
10. Works great with large capacity but slow-to-write backup media like DVD-RAM.
11. It has never damaged my data.

The only downside I've noticed is that the rsync ports to Windows tend to be comparatively CPU-intensive for some reason. Turning off compression helps.

I also use rsync for maintaining my web site, sharing my iCal calendar, syncing my browser bookmarks...

Apple hasn't written too much, but they do have this doc.

Also, macosxlabs.org has written a doc that fills in some gaps. If you are going to be doing a lot during login/logout, you might want to checkout iHook from the University of Michigan. It's a great little tool that give a GUI to boring old shell scripts.

Along with the becoming more and more useful macosxlabs.org, there is the idea that if you cough up $150 per AD server for MS Services for Unix, this software will do most of the work in terms of schema modification.

You don't have to use the file/print services installed by this software, but that may be helpful to you.
We've already covered this in slashdot. Check out articles concering using PAM with AD and there should be a thread there as well.

Mod this up, I hope it helps. Irrational bleats like "IT'S a NIGHTMARE" help no one, especially yourself.

Carbon Copy Cloner is pretty good for getting OS X onto a machine initially, but would be a pain for regular maintenance. I actually use ASR for initial install (macosxlabs.org talks about it here).

I use radmind for regular maintenance of the machines in the the labs I run. It's a powerful unixy tool, a little tricky to get the hang of but it's well worth the effort.

OK, serious misinformation here. Kevin Boyd, University of Michigan, has worked his butt of to work HFS support into rsync. Download it here. Second, as someone else noted, psync is a great utility for backing up Mac OS X -- makes complete bootable backups, does synchronization too. Another great utility is Carbon Copy Cloner -- its a GUI utility for ditto; very simple to use, works with Jaguar, makes a full-bootable backup if so desired. Get it here.

Finally, there is Apple Software Restore. Command line geeks will like the version that ships with Mac OS X Server 10.2. Simple to use, works at the block level, great for mass deployment, works over a network (even over http!), not really appropriate for general backup.

macosxlabs.org is a good site to visit. Several universities are trying this, including the one I work at.

We've got a lab with both XP Pro and OS X computers who have their home directories mounting of a network attached storage device. Account info is pulled from a Samba server for the PCs and an NIS server for the Macs. Marcel Bresink has a nice utility for placing the NFS mount info into Netinfo's database with the right syntax. He also has thorough documentation on getting Mac OS X to speak to an NIS server.

One thing I'd like to see is better documentation for OS X Server 10.2. OS X Server 10.2 is supposed to be do "NFS resharing over AFP" making it easier to have home directories stored on an NAS device. That gets NFS mounted to the OS X Server which looks at that as the home directory location for all the users. That mountpoint then gets shared to users over AFP. It has not been successful and the nice thick server admin guide isn't very clear on the resharing feature except to say that it is there.

You bash the platform for a number of purported deficits, and yet you claim (and demonstrate) a complete lack of knowledge about it.

I suppose I should just let it go, but what really frosts me is how you seem to feel that you are far too "l33t" a badass unix stud for any toy system to satisfy, and yet you obviously aren't willing to invest even the tiniest effort to investigate the actual facts. Do you even realize how asinine that combination of arrogance, ignorance, and ineptness really is? Would you think it appropriate if someone trashed Linux/Perl/GPL/whatever with the same pathetic incompetence?

In a nutshell, though, the answer is yes. Perl? Yes. GCC? Yes. X11? Yes. MYSQL? Yes. Apache/PHP? Yes. Ruby? Yes? POV-RAY? Yes. GIMP? Yes. NetHack? Yes. Whatever does not come preinstalled is readily available not only from Apple, but from the standard distribution channels for the specific tools. In fact, if you look around you will see that most popular apps have OS X on the regular build tree -- run the nightlies all you like.

Anyone who is interested in learning more about the Unix infrastructure of OS X might want to check out the following starter list:

Darwin - Darwin is a complete open-source BSD distribution. Apple makes both the source and extensive documentation available for free. It does the same for a number of other major apps, such as the QuickTime Streaming Server. This does not include the source to things like the Aqua and the user-experience GUI, but it is everything you would get in a regular Unix...because it IS a regular Unix.

Apple Developer Program -- For the price of a free registration, you can download the latest tools (e.g., gcc3, ProjectBuilder), APIs, and sample code directly from Apple. These tools include "generic" Unix favorites as well as a number of extremely powerful OS X-specific tools.

Fink -- The major source of convenient ports using the Debian dpkg and apt-get tools. There are other systems, but Fink makes installing things such as X11, KDE, Gnome et al a snap and has over a thousand of the top apps ready to roll. Don't forget Fink Commander, which gives you a convenient Aqua interface to the Fink tools.

O'Reilly's OS X Developer Center -- O'Reilly needs no introduction, but their OS X developer articles and resources are an excellent source of information for developers of all levels.

Stepwise -- Scott Anguish and the Stepwise folks cut their teeth on NeXT, but they continue to offer gurudom to the OS X community. They regularly detail how to use the latest ports and patches, and know a ton about Cocoa and Mac development.

MAc OS X Labs -- Though their focus is on using OS X in higher education, they are a decent resource for OS X-related development and integration.

Fear not! According to the securemac site and the macosxlabs site, just do the following:

Force Removing Password Protection

1) Add or remove DIMMs to change the total amount of RAM in the computer.

2) Then, the PRAM must be reset 3 times. (Command + Option + P + R).

I'm not sure if just removing the PRAM battery will also reset the PRAM or not in this case.

Is this secure? Well, it depends on your situation. If you are in a lab situation and you don't want the students booting off CDs, ZIPs, external hard drives, etc., for their hax0rish needs, then this works OK. It's easy to spot someone opening up a computer and swapping out ram, etc.

For your own machine? Probably more trouble than it's worth because it causes problems with firmware upgrades, etc. If someone has physical access to your machine, they can get the data off by using the above procedure or by the hard drive swapping someone else mentioned.

Bottom Line: If you have sensitive data on your machine, you should encrypt it even if you have OF password set. In general, if you let someone have physical access to a machine, assume they can get access to all the data on it.

They aren't the only ones that are evading the GPL by claiming "it's not ready yet."

Check out RsyncX for MacOS X. They continue to refuse to release the source, and I and several of my friends have asked repeatedly. They are also under the impression they don't have to release the source until it's "final," even though they are already distributing a binary version!