iMac Labs

[cshertzer]

Hello,

Our school district just ordered 180 new iMacs to be placed in six different classroom lab environments. They will be replacing windows machines that used AD to authenticate and manage users. We also used profile shares so students had roaming capabilities when it came to their files/folders. How could we handle this with the iMacs? I haven't had much success binding our MacBook airs with our AD. Login time would be excessive and that is if it worked. Half the time we would get the error, Network accounts unavailable. We will be running Mac OSx sierra on the iMacs. Anything would be helpful.

Thanks

[a_holley]

We have staff that move between different offices/computers that use iMacs. We manage it much like you would in a Windows environment (or so I believe. I've only ever managed Macs).

We map a folder for them in their AD profile that is locked down so only that particular user has access.
We bind the iMacs to AD, so when they log in the shared folder that contains their home mounts on the desktop, and they are instructed to save everything to that folder. The iMacs are also set to Force Local Homes, so they get a new profile on each machine they log into.

We don't have any issues with binding the computers to AD, nor login issues. The only time we get the Network Accounts Unavailable error is if the computer is offline, or if someone forgot to bind the machine to AD.

The trick we've found is to keep the default user template small, and to not have too many policies running at login.