[indigoimac]

We have a design team that is all mac, they have various hardware and various versions of osx but I'm hoping to get everything to a point where everyone is running 10.5 and Adobe CS3 happily. There are a total of about 9 macs, and 3 XP (probably soon to be Vista [no control over that]) boxes.

The XP machines are on an Active Directory domain and have all sorts of access restrictions imposed on them, and they have access to a 2K3 server w. central storage for everyone to share(across all company divisions, everybody has a place to keep crap, etc).

Now, here's the problem, the macs are all just on their own. They have an IT admin account, and then the user has their own admin account, some don't even have passwords etc. What is the best way to set these guys up? I don't think throwing them on the AD will work, so I guess OSX server comes into play with some sort of central storage via Open Directory(?) My concern is that because of the sizes of the files that are being dealt with (PSDs and such), maybe all remote storage of home directories and such is not such a good idea? But I do need some sort of communal drive to mount on login to store finished projects on the server.

Thoughts?

[Chuckit]

If all you need is a file server, you should be able to set up pretty much any Mac or Windows computer and it will do just fine. For a nine-man shop, that sounds perfectly adequate to me. You don't even need OS X Server unless more than 10 people will be accessing it simultaneously.

[besson3c]

Well, the one often handy thing you can do with a server is setup a centralized authentication source, which would allow your users to login to any one of those machines using a single password. Is this desirable? If not, like Chuckit said, I'm not really sure what problem you are trying to solve with a server....

[indigoimac]

I don't really think the central authentication thing is completely desirable simply because the employees only use their own comps. My question I guess is what's the best solution to managing 10 or so macs running 10.5? I guess just adding the file sever to login items would probably do the job. Maybe partition it so there is a finished drive (for archival) and a collab partition so people can swap stuff that is in progress. That could work.

[besson3c]

That would work, and Apple's Remote Desktop solution makes it easy to push out software/installers and such remotely.

[analogika]

Though even Apple Remote Desktop is probably unnecessary expense for such a small number of machines, considering that logging in via Screen Sharing and running software update or briefly pulling an Adobe update from the file server and installing that is a) not going to happen all that often, and b) not going to take long in a 9-machine setup.


Do note, however, that CS3 won't be fully Leopard-compatible until Adobe releases update patches.
They claim this is going to happen in January, but marketing doesn't necessarily know what the engineers are doing.