Two (business) days in a row!!!

And I'm back, two days in a row (well, 2 business days anyhow!) What kind of fun will we have today? MS Office registration, phones, mac server & wifi issues are all on task today, lets jump right in.

So, we have a new Mac lab here at school and while I love the look (nice and clean) and I love the machines it has been a nightmare getting them to play well with our existing (MS Server 2003 & mostly WinXP boxes) from setting up the OSX server to integrating them all together. WHile the list of problems is long the task today will be working with Eclipse on a Mac in a networked environment. The problem is that the software wants to create its workspace on the local drive which means that my network users with a network home need to create a local space in order to do their work. While this works it means that the user is always tied to a machine and that we don't have backup copies of the files in case of emergency. I've played with command line and preference files t no avail and am now going to create a user group for the class which will set mobile accounts for those selected users, and we're off . . .

1. create a group in the AD called APComputerScience and add a test user to the group (if all works as expected I will add the entire class to the group.)
2. Open the workgroup manager on the OSX server and create a group named APComputerScience_osx with the AD group as its member set.
3. Log in as a user in the APComputerScience group and choose the appropriate group on login so the mac creates a mobile profile and . . . wow it works!!!

Well, I suppose I could keep trying to get it so I can do it "right" but as this seems to be a workable solution I'll stop while I'm ahead and create another entry for the next step of fun for the day . . . fun with MS Office!!!