Parental Control MCX

Hi John,

There is also a shutdown option in Energy Saver preferences... com.apple.MCX

com.apple.EnergySaver.desktop.Schedule (dictionary)
RepeatingPowerOff (dictionary)
eventtype (string) shutdown
time (integer)
weekdays (integer)

Hope this helps,

Lisa.

Lisa Davies
ICT Client Services Manager
Saint Ignatius' College, Riverview
Phone: 02 9882 8413
Mobile: 0417 005 735

Hi John,
I don't know about using parental controls/casper mcx settings, but there are other options.

How about tackling the problem from the other side?

You can setup parental controls on a client computer directly, export the parental controls and then setup a script to import the parental controls into a user account.

Early reports are that lion doesn't play well with AD. (just in case you have new clients coming in x-mas)

Mike

Hi Mike

I'll give the import a go.

Do I just export the MCX for those settings with dscl?

Thanks for the tip - We have a few Lion test machines here, and in their current state they don't even have a place here next year - It's really a shame, Lion could have been great..

John

yep,

------
echo "What is the users name"
read usersname
echo "$usersname"

# this command will export the parental controls to the parental controls plist
# on the directory where the script is run from

dscl . -mcxexport /Users/$usersname -o parental_controls.plist

exit 0
-------

echo "What is the users name"
read usersname
echo "$usersname"

# this command will import the parental controls to the parental controls plist
# on the directory where the script is run from

dscl . -mcximport /Users/$usersname parental_controls.plist

exit 0

---------------
Then you can do something like.
#!/bin/bash

for student in `ls /Users | grep | grep -v DS
# the above assumes your students have _ in their username and that your other accounts don't. Also that there is a .DS_store file that occasionally can show up.
do
#make sure the next directories match up
dscl . -mcximport /Users/${student} parental_controls.plist
done

History has shown that apple will sort out the lion stuff with AD in a couple of months time or less. It's a big issue for allot of people (which means it's a high priority for apple), I wouldn't get too bothered by it.

What I tend to think is a good solution is OD binding to AD and clients binding to OD. I've never been convinced that it's better for clients of any sort to talk to a different OS if you can have them talk to their native one. Things generally work, but sometimes they just don't.

Mike

I am working on a solution at the moment where I have my parental controls on Casper. I have a policy that runs on startup that installs a my parental control settings called studentcontrols.txt file to my management directory. Then it imports that to the local student account.

If things need to be changed I then change it once on one computer export the txt file, move it to casper and then on startup the laptops get the new settings.

I am just testing it now and I can post my final scripts when its been tested and working...

It's not MCX but it gets the job done.

Cheers