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Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) 3 is the latest release of Apple's desktop management software, enabling administrators to distribute software, manage assets, and remotely administer Mac OS X systems via a network. ARD 3 takes advantage of innovative technologies in Mac OS X Tiger such as Automator. Automator is built on the concept of actions - discrete tasks such as opening a file, cropping an image, or sending a message. With Automator users can string together a series of actions into a single Automator workflow document. Much like a script, a workflow document can be executed, triggering each action and passing any data generated by the action to the next action in the workflow. Using the Automator actions installed with ARD and custom actions you create, you can develop workflows to automate repetitive system administration tasks. For example, workflows can distribute software, create detailed software and hardware reports, and remotely configure systems using ARD.

Apple added a "feature" to Leopard which restricts non administrator users from managing printers on their Macs. While this is desired behavior on a public machine such as a classroom, it is a problem for single user machines such as faculty, staff and 1:1 deployments. By default in Leopard, a non-admin user can not add or remove printers. They are also not able to hold or resume a print job. This is a problem if you want users to be able to add printers themselves, especially if they're bringing their laptops home.

Propagator provides a GUI for pushing out files to Macs on your local network. This is useful for OS X system administrators who wish to update all of their managed client machines with a specific file, most commonly property list (.plist) files. This functionality can also be achieved using Apple Remote Desktop, but a free alternative is always worth taking a look. My two favorite aspects of Propagator are its Common Places drop down menu for quickly specifying common locations to drop files (such as long ~/Library paths), and it's Set Ownership check box for giving proper ownership of the file to the right user accounts. The option to Lock Files After Copy prevents users (in my case, students and unknowing faculty) from messing with your work, accidentally or not.

Add Item to Dock is a flexible, open-source tool, released for the benefit of system administrators. Add Item to Dock provides an interface to the defaults program, allowing you to add items to the dock via the command line.

Sure enough: networksetup -setairportnetwork Airport 'Your SSID Here' 'Network Pa$$wOrd Here' did just what I wanted, and it did not require an administrator password or sudo. If you need to get a listing of all of the current Wi-Fi networks which are broadcasting SSIDs, you can use 'airport -s' for a list which will also show what security measures are used. By the way, if you aren't familiar with networksetup, you should definitely read up on it. It has a lot of features that could come in handy. It also wields a great amount of power, so be careful. The command listed above is fairly innocuous but there is a lot more it can do.

Most new consumer Macs come with a built-in iSight camera which can be used for all sorts of fun from video chatting in iChat, horsing around in Photo Booth, to third party apps like Gawker. Despite these fun and harmless uses, there are some security concerns with having a built-in camera particularly in academic and institutional settings, and because of this some System Administrators have taped covers over the iSight and even removed them from the machines entirely. Thankfully, there's a much easier way to disable the built-in iSight camera, all you have to do is move a file.

After updating to Mac OS X 10.5.7, a user may not be able to log in to a managed client workstation. On startup, or after entering the user name and password, the user may be prompted for an administrator name and password, but nothing can be entered. This issue can occur on PowerPC-based Macs if the file /etc/authorization is not updated correctly when installing the Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update.

A hidden user is a user that can login to the system, but the account will not be displayed in the Login Window, where all of the other accounts on the machine are listed. In lab or work environments, it's often desired to have a hidden user that has Admin rights for administrative functions and/or other special circumstances.