Clearing Managed Preferences

[queenwood]

This relates to my boot up external drive that I use to image machines in the field.
When I set an ip address which was in the managed range, the managed preferences where set on the external drive and it is a pain as I need to do some housework on that machine but everything is blocked.
Can turn off managed perferences for all my inventory (or specific location) and then change the IP address of the disk that I want to remain unmanaged?
Or do I have to completely wipe the disk and reinstall OS X?

[mm2270]

The Casper way is to set the MCX pref to "Make this setting unmanaged" in the "Apply Setting to" drop down, which removes the setting. Problem is, that will remove it from all managed systems that are scoped to the Preference Profile the next time they get settings applied.

If you only want to remove them from one Mac, you could make sure the Mac in question is not in the group(s) that is assigned to the Managed Preference Profile, or you could poke around in dscl interactive mode. There are a bunch of options related to mcx settings there. Run this in Terminal for the lowdown:

$ dscl
Entering interactive mode... (type "help" for commands)
> -mcxhelp

You should get a full help menu showing the options, including 'dscl . -mcxdelete' which i believe is what you're looking for.