Losing the directory

I was listening the the most excellent Out of School podcast by Fraser Speirs and Bradley Chambers and was struck by a comment Chambers made about how they had gotten rid of their Active Directory in their school. Now this obviously doesn’t affect iPads, as they don’t need logging in etc, but what was interesting is how they just had local accounts for their Macs. Here’s why I’m interested…

One of the annoying parts of using the Macs at the moment is waiting for network accounts to be available when you first turn them on, and then waiting for login to happen. This wouldn’t be a problem any more!
Another annoying thing is the issues Macs seem to have if you leave a network account logged in for long periods of time. I leave my personal MacBook on all the time and it just wakes up fine, no problem. But network accounts seem to be a lot more unstable, so much so that I encourage teachers to turn off, or at least log off, their Mac at the end of every day.
Now obviously one would still like the benefits of being able to manage the preferences on a Mac, even if one wasn’t using a directory. Now my understanding of Profile Manager is that it pushes preferences directly to a Mac without the need for a directory as such. Interesting and interestinger!

First day back…

I went back to school today to try and get ready for the beginning of term. As always, there’s lots of jobs that come up along the way, but here are a few things I managed to accomplish today:

Apply for some ‘up-to-date’ Mountain Lion licences for some Mac Minis that we bought after Mountain Lion was finally announced. I had to go into school to get some serial numbers and to get invoices from our reseller, but it was pretty straightforward. Today’s the last day that you can apply so I was cutting it a bit fine.
Set up a repository for Munki on our Mac Mini server. We’ve been using Munki with much success just as a way to automatically install Apple’s software updates when the computer is logged out. It’s pretty handy! However, I’ve been wanting to use it update other software (such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Flash Player), rather than having to push out packages using Apple Remote Desktop. I followed a really clear guide on the Munki website, which took a bit of time to get my head around but seems to have worked fine.

Bicycle for the mind

Just been watching a lost interview from Steve Jobs in 1990 where he clearly gives his ‘bicycle for the mind’ quote about computers. It’s at around 3:00 of the video. I’ve tried looking for the exact quote before, but couldn’t find it anywhere accurately.

Well, here it is…

“So for me, a computer has always been a bicycle for the mind, something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.” (Steve Jobs)

Macs and Antivirus

Yesterday I noticed that the top free app on the Mac App Store was a piece of antivirus software. Very depressing.

Why is it depressing? Now I know there have been a few virus scares on the Mac recently, but on the whole OSX is much more secure than Windows. The problem with antivirus software is that it slows down a computer as it continually checks files and processes for errant behaviour. I’ve noticed that some of the Macs at school run quite slowly compared with my own MacBook Air, particularly with startup times. I suspect that the wonderful SMART software and drivers might be something to do with it, but probably Sophos antivirus is too. I’m under the impression that using Sophos is required by LGfL, but maybe it’s not. And it’s not as if all the iPads can run Sophos either…

…so maybe I’ll try removing Sophos and see what happens then. Am I being foolish and crazy?