Embed custom new user profile

You want root to have access and chmod 700 to the template file itself. Basically when a user logs in, OS X under-the-hood just ditto's the folders/files from the template into the user's home folders, and the rest of the plist files are created when the app they are using runs for the first time.

What is it exactly you want to change in the user template?

-tom

We've just got a "default profile" setup with some configuration stuff. This was something transitioned from the windows world to have a custom default profile that way we know all the settings (proxy, homepage, dockfixup, etc...) are set. Still seems that every once in a while I get a default mac profile, not the one we set.

Permissions should be set to whatever they will be in the resulting home folder. Ownership should be set to root, with group wheel.

The User Template folder itself should be root:wheel with 0700.

And you shouldn't be doing this, unless you have a very good reason to do so. What are you trying to accomplish?

Ah gotcha, I use MCX for almost all of that stuff and don't touch the user template really.

Wont that affect systems already in place and not new users?

MCX has a few levels of appliance. They are:

1) Always
2) Often
3) Once

Always applies to the setting always, regardless of new or old user, regardless of what user logs in, as it is a computer level policy. Often, applies to all users regardless of new or old, but the user can adjust the settings and change the preference in question. However, "Often," will be renewed every time MCX refreshes. Which is every x amount of minutes, every log in/out and restart and boot up. Once gets applied once and that is it.

You can also create computer records for MCX. If you wanted to, you could use WGM on a local machine, point it to the localhost, and set up a guest computer. Set all MCX settings to the guest computer and then apply it to that user. You could then use dscl to export/import the MCX file.

I have also captured user level prefs with composer and used it to push out to all users and then set the policy to self healing. Keep it ongoing so it always gets applied and make it available off line so it can be ran even though the JSS is not accessible. The only downside to this is you gotta go flush your logs every now and then before they get up into the trillions of runs.

-Tom

We just had a discussion about this little bit ago were we went into detail about ways to do custom user templates.

The best way to do this would MCX and have a default group for each profile. If you have any non MCX changes you would like to make you could package them to install at imaging or at login.

--
Matt Lee
FNG Sr. IT Analyst / Desktop Architecture Team / Apple S.M.E / JAMF Casper Administrator
Fox Networks Group
matthew.lee at fox.com<mailto:matthew.lee at fox.com>

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