Sidebar Favorites

Its not really my place to question why you would need or want to prevent users from doing this. But user level settings like items in the sidebar are pretty tough to lock down/. This is by design. They aren't really something that affects anyone but the user. Maybe with Parental Controls, though I don't use that at all so i don't know.

Outside of the above, I don't think the plist can be controlled with MCX or Config Profiles. You can set them once, or at each login, but locking it down entirely? The only way i can see to do that would be to script changing the preference file to be owned by root:wheel with no write privileges to the user. That is, after you've set it up the way you want. That's a kludgy solution though.

Unfortunately, it's something that my client wants.

@mm2270 got two of the things i thought might be able to do it. Parental controls and simple Finder will probably be too restrictive. changing the permissions on the file to root will prevent it from being written to the file, but with preferences living in memory at this point, i doubt it will stop anything. The other thing you can try is custom Profile settings. if you configure the sidebar the way you want it and then find the file or files that manage it, then import into profile manager or use mcxToProfile it may work, but it would require testing, because of lot of profile things that should work rarely do the way you expect them to. take said profile and import it into Casper and you should have something to test with anyway.

I see. Well, like I said, I don't know that there is a way to prevent users from adding items in there. I haven't tried locking down the plist itself. Its possible it could work, but the OS may also just create a new file if the one in the Preferences folder is inaccessible to the user. I've seen the OS try to work around issues like that automatically. It might be a losing battle.

Looked at Simple Finder and I thought this would be a viable option but it takes away the option of having external drives mount. This would have been the perfect solution but then they want clients to be able to see their external drives on the desktop and simple finder kills that.