[alphasubzero949]

I have witnessed these with my own eyes, coming from someone who has to babysit a lab full of G4's, eMacs, iMacs, and old school Performas.


I can honestly say that Jaguar is not quite viable for a lab setting for the following reasons:

1. Whenever a program (most of the time Internet Exploder) goes into a spinning beachball, the students either walk away thinking the computer has crashed, unplug/replug it, or give it the old three-finger salute. Apple needs to have an option to turn on a dialog that appears after a few seconds directing the user to force quit the crashed application.

(No, I don't have admin privileges to put Safari on these machines as much as I want to)

2. On the computers in a different lab where I have deleted Internet Exploder, you'd be surprised at what lengths students will go to find it, often launching the classic version. The techs got mad that I installed Safari and have since took away my admin privileges. So those machines got stuck with V60 in the Applications folder. Fortunately, I downloaded V73 and stuck it somewhere in the student home account and put that copy in the Dock...heh heh heh

3. Some students don't know what the hell to do with the Dock. They look for the "Start" menu or go fiddling with the top menus to launch programs. Others drive through Finder windows to the Applications folder. DUH.

4. Here's the most annoying thing: students pulling stuff OUT of the Dock.

5. Print Center is also problematic. Every time a print job fails, somehow the settings in Print Center get messed up by students trying to print their stuff off some remote printer on the other side of campus, or by deleting the printer all together. HP is the worst offender for problems.


I guess I shouldn't complain so much...it's better than the Performas getting their files all rearranged!


Any other lab techs have similar horror stories?

[:haripu:]

I guess most of your (valid) points can be resolved by just teaching the students how to use OSX. Nothing as complex as an OS can be so easy to use that it is self-explanatory.

But you are right, I would like to see a way to lock the dock, though.

[Gee4orce]

ISTR a shareware/freeware tool that will reset the dock to a default setting when you log in....

[DeathMan]

we have a pretty cool system at my school where pretty much every student has a user account. It all gets run off a master linux server using LDAP. The home directories get mounted over the network (NFS, I'm pretty sure, on the mac side, PC's get SMB)

So we've got some macs running OS X, some pcs running Win2k, and a few debian boxes chugging away that rarely get used.

This system is pretty nice because you can only screw up your own dock. Plus people coming in from other departments (business students, bleah) they can't log in anyway cause they don't have accounts.

This solves a number of issues. 1) usually its the same student(s) that are messing up all the machines. They'll mess up the printer settings on this machine, and it won't print, so they move to this machine with a bad zip disk so this one won't read zip disks, so they move over here, and accidently delete the applications folder (or worse).

These students are now known because they always mess up their own accounts. This is why Mac OS X is awesome for multiple users. Most of the time users don't even know they're restricted. In my experience, in Windows, you can never quite do what you want, when the restrictions are turned on. (We can't even look at the date/time)

The main problems come when the network goes down (happend once in 2 semesters) the finder freaks out and just spinns. Don't really know why it can't die gracefully, but its pretty bad.

The other bad thing is that we haven't got the gigabit set up yet, so things can get laggy (especialy for the video class when the students I referred to earlier forget to change their scratch disks to local space rather than filling their 3 gig quota in about 10 minutes into their video project.)

Ahh life as a lab assistant. you can have it.

[970]

I can? Well I'll take it! Pretty sweet to be helping out the college girls on a Mac!

[DeathMan]

Actually, I met my wife while working in the lab. So, I guess I just lost interest in the lab thing after that. Mission accomplished.

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by DeathMan:
we have a pretty cool system at my school where pretty much every student has a user account. It all gets run off a master linux server using LDAP. The home directories get mounted over the network (NFS, I'm pretty sure, on the mac side, PC's get SMB)

Ok, PLEASE tell me how you did that. I've been trying for about 3 months and I'm still no further! I've searched everywhere for information and followed instructions on www.macosxlabs.org to no avail. I'm stuck!

We have servers running Slackware Linux with a bunch of directories being shared out by Netatalk. I've installed OpenLDAP on a test server and created a mini BerkleyDB database for login authentication (annoyingly I can't even seem to authenticate against a passwd file!) However, for the life of me, I can't get OS X to mount the server on which the home directories reside.

Can you give me some pointers please? Thanks

[sushiism]

bah the techs at my uni are too moronic to figure out how to let people get to home directories on the macs (running os9 at the moment, prolly have the new MDD powermacs running osx after summer for maya work) but the guy in the mac labs is great and helps fix student macs if they break which happens to my friends ibook a shocking amount of times gah she must be installing something crazy on it.

Can't you lock users from messing about with the dock or deleting the applications folder in osx?

[chris v]

Originally posted by DeathMan:
Actually, I met my wife while working in the lab. So, I guess I just lost interest in the lab thing after that. Mission accomplished.

post of the day.

CV

[chris v]

Originally posted by sushiism:


Can't you lock users from messing about with the dock or deleting the applications folder in osx?

Don't know about the dock, but you can set the permissions on the applications forlser to Others: read only. That should keep non-admins from deleting applications.

CV

[Mithras]

You can set a user to 'Restricted', click 'capabilities', and specify that they cannot add or remove items inthe dock.

[Oneota]

Originally posted by Geobunny:
Ok, PLEASE tell me how you did that. I've been trying for about 3 months and I'm still no further!

We have servers running Slackware Linux with a bunch of directories being shared out by Netatalk. I've installed OpenLDAP on a test server and created a mini BerkleyDB database for login authentication (annoyingly I can't even seem to authenticate against a passwd file!) However, for the life of me, I can't get OS X to mount the server on which the home directories reside.

Can you give me some pointers please? Thanks

I'll second that! We've gotten LDAP authentication working, but Netatalk home directory mounting is another issue; one I'd give someone else's right arm to fix (I kinda need mine, 'n all).

By the way, Geobunny; have you noticed reliability/speed issues with Netatalk and OS X? Specifically releated to the Office vX apps?

[gorickey]

Originally posted by Mithras:
You can set a user to 'Restricted', click 'capabilities', and specify that they cannot add or remove items inthe dock.

Exactly, I have used this in our lab setting and it works just fine...that and some "Simple Finder" capabilities...

[cambro]

You can still make aliases to applications. Why not make aliases to the applications the students go looking for and leave them on the desktop?? They'll never go away unless somebody trashes them.

Turn off the dock if the students are so windows-washed that they can't figure it out.

Oh, and GOOD SUGGESTION concerning the spinning beachball and automatic force quit window. X knows the application is screwed becaue the offender is often red in the force quit dialogue. It would be trivial to implement this.

[Oneota]

Originally posted by cambro:
Oh, and GOOD SUGGESTION concerning the spinning beachball and automatic force quit window. X knows the application is screwed becaue the offender is often red in the force quit dialogue. It would be trivial to implement this.

For that matter, it probably wouldn't be too tough for a third party to release an app like this. Who knows; a VersionTracker (or MacUpdate) search might reveal that someone already has!

[alphasubzero949]

Some of your suggestions are really good (if only I had admin privileges to do them). I too know that screwed up apps appear in red, but what about the majority of the students that use these computers. They know NOTHING about Macs and are using them as a last resort because the PC labs are full.

I wish Apple or some third party comes out with something that senses a crashed app and prompts the user to quit it.

[gorickey]

Originally posted by alphasubzero949:
Some of your suggestions are really good (if only I had admin privileges to do them). I too know that screwed up apps appear in red, but what about the majority of the students that use these computers. They know NOTHING about Macs and are using them as a last resort because the PC labs are full.

I wish Apple or some third party comes out with something that senses a crashed app and prompts the user to quit it.

My idea for you in this case would be to make a desktop picture that contains some nifty "Tool Tips" or something that obviously will always show on the Finder and could tell the end users to force quit the app if the beachball shows...be creative with it.

[ervier]

Originally posted by alphasubzero949:

3. Some students don't know what the hell to do with the Dock. They look for the "Start" menu or go fiddling with the top menus to launch programs. Others drive through Finder windows to the Applications folder. DUH.

You could create a standard background with short explanations on how to kill an app or how to start something. Just a suggestion.....

[gorickey]

Originally posted by ervier:
You could create a standard background with short explanations on how to kill an app or how to start something. Just a suggestion.....

OMG! Did you not read what I just put above your comment? Haha.

Nice.

[waffffffle]

At my school only one lab on the entire campus is running OS X, and only recently has it been switched over to 10.2. In 10.1 it used to suck royaly and in someways it still does. No permissions to do anything. 2 logins required to use the machines because OS logon uses either kerberos or LDAP and mounting the users home directory uses SMB and those passords may or may not be the same (but its smart enough not to prompt you if the are the same). Back in 10.1 the login process would take over a minute, which they've now fixed, and it also used to reboot the machine upon logout (ridiculous).

The IT department has managed to scare away most students from using these OS X iMacs since they sucked so much for so long running 10.1 They still only have IE and if a user wants to run their own software it will take up space in their user account on the network. Students are suppposed to get 20 megs of acount space (also can be used as web storage) which is way too small, but the IT department now allows free 50 meg quota increases for OS X users.

Some of the cool things that they got working in 10.2 include the fact that all of your settings follow you from computer to computer since your home directory is on the network. Also at your first login Mail.app is automatically configured for you to use the campus email server (which is actually a little complicated for most users to set up since it uses SMTP authentication over SSL and most users don't turn that on).

So 10.2 is definitely lab worthy if set up properly. In my opinion 10.1 was too but the IT department here didn't know what they were donig. It took them a good 6 months to figure it out.

[Thinine]

I work at a lab at Iowa State University and we seem to be the only ones without problems. We run a lab full of older G4 towers with 10.2.

At ISU, every student gets a NetID and password when they first come to campus for orientation. That login is not only their email account but also used for logging into most university machines, including the ones where I work. Two things happen when a person logs in. First, the computer finds their account name by accessing our university server (2 TB of storage. Everyone has 50 MB of disk space.) through LDAP and finding their account. Second, it then authenticates using Kerberos and the student's password. Now, there is one thing we don't have OS X do right now and that is mount the student's AFS directory since OS X has problems with that right now.

Students can change anything (that they have permissions for) while they are logged in but when they log out, a script runs to replace the user directory with a fresh copy. So any changes the student makes are undone. We've been running a setup like that for a few weeks now and it's running very well. Our setup webpage is here and here. Neither of those are run by me.

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by Oneota:
I'll second that! We've gotten LDAP authentication working, but Netatalk home directory mounting is another issue; one I'd give someone else's right arm to fix (I kinda need mine, 'n all).

By the way, Geobunny; have you noticed reliability/speed issues with Netatalk and OS X? Specifically releated to the Office vX apps?

Looks like we're at the same place. I can authenticate against LDAP and the user can log in, but they only have a home directory if a temporary local home has been set up.

RE: Your question. Are you talking about reliability/speed issues while logged in via LDAP auth? If so, I can't comment as I don't stay logged in like that for extended periods of time. On my main machine I have a local account as I'm the only one that uses it.

However, on my main machine, I have Netatalk servers mounted almost constantly but haven't yet noticed any speed/reliability issues. Sorry. Are you getting that one more than one machine?

[ngrundy]

My Uni has 10.2 on the desktops that works fine.

the Home directories are mounted via nfs off of our main student server (Sun e250). Authentication is done via a MacOSX Server I belive. by using some sort of custom script between the Sun box and the OSX server.

If you're not using Workgroup manager smack someone the upside. WGM allows you to force dock items and stuff it also lets you setup volumes that should be auto mounted. WGM effectivly replaced Mac Manager.

I've wrote some scripts that do NIS -> NI intergration but they are OS9 (client side) specific at the moment due to not having completed OSX testing and upgrades. Also the script is horidly inefficient and i wouldn't want to scale it past 2000 users.

[SpeedRacer]

All this talk of network-based home directories... yowzers! Perhaps this is effective for environments with switched networks > 10BT, word-processing labs, or different servers for each room, but from what i've seen the best approach to public labs is the following:

Servers:

• Remote authentication
• Single remote mount point

Local:

• Local home directory efreshed on login from a different "template" user home directory. IOW: a "template" account and a "guest" account. On login, refresh guest from template.

This approach allows any user to have his/her own unique login without the bandwidth limitations inherent in network-based home dirs.

Moreover, if you need to make a change in any of your lab's guest accounts, you simply make the change in your template account remotely (via Remote Desktop or Timbuktu) and on the next login/restart the guest account is refreshed with your changes. In fact you can even setup a scheduled refresh of your template account as well by using Remote Desktop's "Schedule" functionality to copy down a new template home directory from your server every day at X hour.

The point being that if you only had the guest account, you might have to worry about modifying "live" prefs/directories. But by modifying a home directory OUTSIDE of the one is use (your TEMPLATE account), you can be sure that the files are generally not in use at the time you are copying new changes down to each machine.

PS: http://www.bombich.com is a MUST READ for any Macintosh lab manager.

Enjoy!

Speed

[Geobunny]

Bump!

Waiting (hopefully) for a response from DeathMan!

[gorickey]

Originally posted by Geobunny:
Bump!

Waiting (hopefully) for a response from DeathMan!

PM him.

[Oneota]

Originally posted by gorickey:
PM him.

...and then post his reply here.

[Geobunny]

Originally posted by gorickey:
PM him.

I have......

Originally posted by Oneota:

...and then post his reply here.

...and I will!

[Groovy]

http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/14756


ask moki to add auto scan and put up a window
when an app freezes asking you if you would like to quit or force quit and relaunch etc....

the app can sit in teh background and ping (haha you know what i mean) other apps if no reponse, up pops the window.

[Richard Edgar]

I don't think anyone else has commented on this yet, so....

I wish Apple or some third party comes out with something that senses a crashed app and prompts the user to quit it.

That sounds suspiciously like the Halting Problem - the solution of which is generally acknowledged to be somewhat difficult.