Mac Labs with 10.13

ztgoeder
New Contributor

In relation to https://www.jamf.com/jamf-nation/discussions/27016/ldap-binding-10-13, we are looking for more generally, an answer to how others are/if they are, having labs full of macs. Are you syncing files for users, using r-sync, just putting the files in home drives, are you even using network home drives? Are you just using local accounts that wipe on log out and just force them to upload everything to google drive, one drive, thumb drive?

Our personal experience with NIS bound machines with NFS home directories is that more and more lately applications have stopped working with the network home drive. I.E. adobe premiere, endnote x8. And the performance of having libraries on network drives has been sub-optimal (browser cache, adobe cache, on a network drive is garbo) Unfortunately you can't redirect just library caches to a local disk because other things just stop working. Nevermind the fact that apple has removed the NIS binding from 10.13.

Just looking for others opinions and thoughts. Thanks and have a good day.

4 REPLIES 4

BOBW
Contributor II

We are running a script which will wipe user accounts after 7 days, this gives students a chance to come back to the computer for the next few days. and hopefully it is available when they do. But we also encourage students to save all data to One Drive. We do not sync One Drive to the lab machines as we might have a few users over time which may fill up the drive.

ztgoeder
New Contributor

Has anyone else had to do this? Right now we're just running on 10.12, but our biggest lab is getting new machines this summer and we need to figure out 10.13 as those will most likely not be able to run anything but.

Look
Valued Contributor III

We have AD bound machines and we mount students personal network drives on login. We also allow them to put stuff on the local desktop but user profiles are wiped after 7 days to prevent machines filling up.
We are in the process of migrating them from internally hosted shares to O365 One Drive so that will change things a bit, cross that bridge when we come to it.

CCNapier
Contributor

We are currently running 10.11.6, so not come across 10.13 issues as yet. I am looking at upgrading all devices, so have been testing with no real problems with AD/shares etc in 10.13 (it's just the upgrade that I'm having issues with).

Currently:
- AD users, script to mount shares on login based on user groups.
- Put a link to their mounted "network home" share in the Documents folder for now.
- Not deleting profiles on logout (this was causing some issues with the dock for some reason) but looking to do that soon as I think we may have overcome the issue - concerned about people putting large files on their desktop and filing up.