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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.

Here's a cleaned-up version of the script I use, with site-specific stuff removed for the most part. If you use this, you'll need to modify the paths to any local user home directories for any local users you have on your image. There are generic examples for a local admin user named "admin" and the root user (which if you never login as root, you shouldn't have to clean up!)

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.

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.

Here's a version of a script we use on all our machines in an attempt to reduce energy usage with a minimum of visible impact on users. Our machines are set to not sleep during the day. This script runs hourly, and if it's after 7pm and the machine has been idle for 20 minutes or more, it tries to sleep the machine if someone is logged in, or shut it down if no-one is logged in. The machine is also set to automatically startup or wake at 6am M-F. The net result is that most of our desktop machines go to sleep or shutdown a little after 7pm each weeknight and wake up at 6am each week morning, and our users are none the wiser.

Strangely hidden from the casual user is a spiffy command line utility that allows you to view, configure, and troubleshoot your Mac's wireless connection. It doesn't appear to be well documented, and judging by the obscure location of the command, Apple probably didn't think it would be too useful for the average Mac user. But the hidden command line airport tool is very useful indeed, so here is how to access it, and how you can use it too. The first thing you'll want to do is create a symbolic link to the airport command, because it is situated in a very inconvenient location for quick usage.

Twin is the most flexible online backup solution for Mac OS X, compatible with most Internet servers: FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, MobileMe. It even supports offline backups to external drives. Twin is a true Mac product that preserves Finder info, resource forks, ACLs, Privileges and comes with an elegant user interface and a powerful assistant. It also provides numerous high-end features like AES-256 encryption, efficient bz2 compression, powerful exclusion rules and scheduler, support for splitting large files during network transfers, network-error recovery, individual digital signature for backed up files, multi-cores machines optimization and much more!

In Mac OS X 10.5.7 or later, access to add or delete network printers on a client computer is controlled by membership in the lpadmin group. You can control the ability of managed user accounts to add and delete printers by controlling the membership of this group.

Autodesk is expanding assistance for Macintosh users by adding support for Boot Camp for select products in addition to offering native Mac OS products.

An Apple employee (call him "Alpha") who works in the iPhone Development Department has leaked some information to us recently, most of which will come as a surprise to many. The amount of shocking information leaked is beyond the grasp of an individual and shows how far Apple and AT&T will go to lock their users and steal their information while they have no clue about it.

Almost a year ago Apple gave us Leopard (OS X 10.5), and along with it came virtual desktops for the masses, in the form of Spaces. For many this was an interesting new way to expand their workspace virtually. For the rest of us [power users?] it was a letdown in execution. What was worse, the third party options looked to be dwindling as well. Last November I called for third party developers to bring the competition - let's take a look at the result of that call to arms.

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.

A place where new Mac users can find comprehensive, unbiased information about using a Mac, and Mac Pros can share the years of wisdom they have acquired

Network Home Redirector... While network-based home directories provide many benefits, they also bring some unwanted headaches. These headaches usually come in the form of Microsoft Office User Data folder issues, as well as AFP performance issues when dealing with thousands, sometimes millions of cache files. If you would like to redirect some of that traffic to the local machine, instead of taxing your network and your AFP servers, NHR might be for you. Download the DMG file and choose the appropriate package installer(s) for your environment. That's it.

Apple has removed a widely publicized support document from its website that encouraged Mac OS X users to install antivirus software, explaining that its operating system was designed with safeguards to protect against malicious attacks on its own.

With its use of the latest Mac OS X technologies, breakthrough ease-of-use and innovation, all Mac users will find CheckUp very useful and even fun. It's the dashboard of your Mac! CheckUp is designed to check your disks and memory but also to monitor the usage of CPU, Memory, Disk Drives and Network Adapters in a very visual way. By adding rules that will be triggered when certain conditions are met for a specified resource on the computer, you can receive visual notifications. For example, CheckUp can alert you when a hard drive seems to have hardware failures, even when the application is not opened (thanks to an innovative background process).

For individual Mac users or small businesses, it's usually not a problem deploying new Macs with a standard image -- as a Mac support specialist, you might just load each machine manually. But imagine if you need to deploy hundreds or thousands of Macs, PCs, or XServes. You'd need a small army of techs or a way to do the job automatically. That's where DeployStudio comes in handy. This freeware tool can be used to create deployment files using Netboot, external USB or FireWire drives, or any AFP, SMB, or NFS sharepoint on the network.

One of the classrooms I maintain is comprised of 2.4Ghz iMacs (MB323LL/A) that are dual booted with Windows XP and Mac OS X. Sometimes when the workstations are restarted from XP to OS X the display brightness gets changed to its dim power saver setting. This requires the user manually increase the display brightness by pressing the F2 key, which is inconvenient. I haven't been able to determine the cause of this issue so I wanted to create a login hook to increases the brightness as a temporary fix. OS X doesn't ship with a command line utility that let's you change display brightness. Fortunately, Nicholas Riley has written a utility that uses OS X frameworks to accomplish this quickly and easily. Here's the code