COVID woes, close labs, disable logons from Jamf?

metalfoot77
Contributor II

Hi folks,

I work at a university and part of our plan for returning students during COVID is to limit the amount of available Mac hardware in our computer labs. Sort of a "every other mac is available" sort of plan.

However, we would like to somehow disable the ability to logon to the machines instead of just powering them off (students will just power them on).

Anyone have any ideas how we can accomplish this via Jamf?

2 REPLIES 2

jefff
Contributor II

If the user accounts that the students use are in Active Directory, you could remove cached local accounts from the Macs and unbind those Macs from AD.

In my experience, students are known to plop down at unused workstations and plug in their own laptops to do work, to be near their friends and classmates. (I've seen them unplug lab computers and leave them unplugged, to make room for their own uses for the outlet the lab computer was using!) You'll probably need some kind of physical barrier to using the workstation space to prevent it from being dynamically repurposed by your users.

metalfoot77
Contributor II

Thanks @jefff , we certainly see all kinds of creativity when it comes to our students plugging and unplugging stuff to work. At this point I think we are on the fence about physically removing the machines or just disabling access to them. Thank your for the suggestion about removing the AD binding. That would definitely work as they use AD to authenticate.