Preconfigured user profile for lab environment

[jhuls]

When I was doing Windows support, I had the luxury of being able to use mandatory profiles to keep lab profiles with specific settings in order. Students don't have their own accounts so it was easy to configure a profile exactly the way an instructor wanted it even down to what the settings should be for different software.

I've recently implemented something similar with Casper where I've made a dmg of the profile used by the students with the instructor configuring the software the way he wants so that the user settings are saved into the profile. I then have a policy that, on logout, does an "rm -rf" to the profile and then it copies off of the server the preconfigured profile we created.

So far so good but....there's always a but. It's about 750MB and I would prefer not to pull that off of the server every single time if I can avoid it. I was eyeballing the cache feature thinking that might be the answer to this but when I did a test run, it worked one time and then failed. The log said it couldn't find it. So my question is does the cache really work to where it can only be used once and it's gone? I was expecting it to stay on the machine until I told it otherwise. Ideas?

If someone has another solution, I'm all ears as well. The previous tech would just configure the system, used DeepFreeze in the lab, and gave everyone admin access. I'm not a fan of giving admin to students or using DF.

[luispalumbo]

Hi @jhuls,

When you meant you created a DMG file with the user profile on it, did you mean the Dock preferences, the wallpaper, desktop items, documents, movies, and all these things that are going to be the same for every new student on that particular computer, is that right?

If so, you can copy the default profile into the /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj.

What I usually do is I create a default image with most of the applications, install updates, change the wallpaper, change the dock, remove the login keychain, clean the recent folders menu and the recent items menu, with the support user.

Once I've finished configuring the profile I restart the computer and go to the single-user mode, Cmd+s after the chime. In the command line I type:

cp -r /Users/support/ /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj

After that just restart the computer typing ```
exit
or
shutdown -r now
```

From now on, every new user in that computer will have exactly the same settings as your default user at the time you copied the profile.

Just let me know in case you need some more help with that.

[jhuls]

Hi luispalumbo - Thanks...that is what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the user profile.

I should have mentioned that I started going that route but I used a dmg so that I could easily do this one time and let Casper push it to multiple systems in the lab. The problem was though that in the first lab I'm doing we have a product, FontAgent Pro Cloud, which uses the keychain to store credentials for access to the server. If someone has a way to add those credentials into a pre-existing keychain, I might consider going back that direction. I did some looking at the closest I could find was that in previous versions of OSX there were ways to script such a thing but Apple removed that ability at a later time. I'm certainly not an expert with keychain so it's entirely possible the ability is there but just not obvious to me.