[scip]

I have to rebuild a Mac at work. I'm no stranger to rebuilding Macs, but there was a consultant in before me and he came in and said that the Macs were configured all "wrong" and he rebuilt a few of them. The problem is that the users now think his word is the gospel and they are reluctant to let anyone else touch their Macs. He went on to say that a Mac has to be built according to "Apple Standards" and that there are certain services that have to be shut off when connecting to an xserve (which we have), and that graphics workstations have to be optimized (with TechTool) to work properly.

As far as I know, it is pretty much impossible to build out a Mac "wrong" and the procedure certainly isn't rocket science.

In summary, I would think that you do the following:

-backup data
-format drive
-install OS
-install any patches to OS
-install major applications
-install utilties
-configure printers, networking, etc.
-bring user data back onto machine
-do final checks and tweaks

This consultant went on to say that there are "services" that need to be turned off when you connect a Mac to a server, etc. When I asked (through email) what "services" he was talking about, as all services (i.e., ftp, http, etc.) are off by default, he really didn't answer. I think he is just trying to preserve himself and get the billable hours, but the deck is stacked against me and now I'm left doubting myself.

Is there any credence to what this guy is saying? I can't believe that rebuilding a Mac is that difficult, especially with the way Apple makes the reinstall process pretty much idiot/bullet proof.

If these "Apple Standards" exist, where are they, and why aren't they publicly available? This consultant is Apple Certified, and he does know his stuff, but I can't believe that Apple would hold this stuff back from the public (I can't believe I just suggested that .

Any input?

[P]

If Apple had standards for how to configure a Mac, don't you think they would configure all machines like that at delivery?

This is different for Windows, as the computer is shipped out by say HP or Dell, and they might (and usually do) configure it differently. As an example, less than a year ago I installed a bunch of stuff (Office and the like) on a new Toshiba laptop. That laptop was configured with two partitions with FAT32 filesystem and Data Execution Prevention turned all the way off (the idiots had also disabled the NX bit on the CPU in BIOS. Both of these are not possible to even set that way without hacking. In such a situation, you might reset the computer to "Microsoft standard", which indeed would be an improvement in most cases.

I suspect that said consultant is either inflating his own value or just bullshitting.OS X doesn't ship with any network services active by default, so FTP, HTTP and the like are always off, but there are indeed services that are active by default. They have to be, in most cases. Back in the olden days of OS 9, Macs shipped with Appletalk on (although file sharing was off). It was standard on a shared network to turn this off (Appletalk can get noisy on a large, low-bandwidth network). There also might be services that individual users have turned on, but a reinstall takes care of that.

Finally: Are you using Active Directory or any other directory server to handle logins? There are some configurations required to get it to work with such a server, but they can hardly be called "returning it to Apple standard".