Mac Systems Management

johannacw writes "This story has in-depth info about managing Macs using Apple's Managed Preferences architecture. It covers how to use the 14 built-in systems-management areas, how preferences interact, how to secure workstations, and how to help users access resources including applications and printers. It's a must-read for any systems admin working in a Mac or mixed environment. Written by Ryan Faas, this is a follow-up to his popular Inside Apple's Workgroup Manager."

Comments

Macs aren't supposed to be "managed"

[weak*]

iThey're ifree-spirited isystems ifor ifree-spirited ipeople, iremember?

You can hardly manage the Mac from there

[tsa]

In their obsession with keeping things simple Apple has IMO cut a few too many corners in the area of disk sharing. If you want to share a folder for use on a Windows computer, you can only share all home directories, or nothing. If I switch on Personal File Sharing suddenly all my applications and all data of all users is available for everyone to see. And a few days ago I discovered that even while I had everything but remote logon (which basically means sshd) and Windows Sharing (which uses a modified smb.conf so I only share the directories I want) switched on in the Preferences, I could still access my whole harddisk remotely from my Linux PC. Luckily I did need a password for that, but still... Shame on you Apple! And that's not all. On the samba implementation on OSX, password handling is so broken it's unusable. The command smbpasswd runs but it doesn't do anything. Any password you type seems to be totally ignored. So I have to share my directories with no password. Shame on you again Apple! Shame shame shame. Even Windows does better in this area. I hope they will fix all that in Leopard.