Missing font Adobe CS 5 - Arno Pro

Just had a request to install Arno Pro. Of course I'd never heard of it, and doubted whether it had been installed as a default.

But, upon further investigation (Wiki) I found that it did actually come with Adobe CS3. With all the machines in college being re-imaged. Adobe CS 5 and the whole of Windows had probably been installed from scratch and hence Arno Pro would have been lost.

Thankfully I found the Adobe CS3 premium disk and found the fonts dmg file:

Adobe\ CS3\ Design\ Premium/Adobe\ CS3\ Design\ Premium/payloads/AdobeFontsAll/AdobeFontsAll.dmg

and within found the Arno Pro font family. odt. Sorted!

OS X 10.6.6 Active Directory login Illustrator Print.ai is an unknown format

Well, this is the continuation of Active Directory home drives and software troubles related to it. At the moment when most members of staff and students open a new Illustrator file they get the error message:

The file "Print.ai" is an unknown format and cannot be opened.

If you click OK a couple of times it then gives you the make a new document type window, where you can select a template etc. When you click OK to this you get one more of the errors above, and after this you finally get this error:

Can't create a new illustration. The command was canceled.

Just thinking about it, I've not actually tried opening an existing Illustrator file, but I shall when I next get the chance. Interestingly, this does not happen to all Active Directory logins. I've not been able to deduct what is the difference between logins that can and can't.

I've updated to the latest version of Illustrator - 11.0.2. We used to use NHR (Network Home Relocator) which relocated the "/Library/Caches" folder, and sorted out a lot of troubles. One in particular related to illustrator showing images placed in a document. Unfortunately I can't get NHR to work on 10.6.6.

If anyone else can add to this, whether they also have this problem, or they have suggestions, all is welcome.

Deploying 802.1X wifi profiles on OS X 10.6.6

I've just been told that the wifi routers and settings have just been updated and all MacBook Pro's need these settings updating too. Specifically for the 802.1X system Profile for logging in Wirelessly. I've put a few posts up about setting that up, and thankfully these new settings are very similar to the old.

ICT Services told me that the new wifi was WPA2 + AES, and had a different name.

What I really wanted to know was whether I could 'deploy' these settings to all the computers I administer. Well, it looks like the answer is 'Yes'.

I found this forum which discussed some command line tools which export and import, and change the settings. The command line tool was "networksetup" and I'm sure I've used it before.

Before starting down this route, I decided to look at the GUI, and I found that you could simply export all your settings as a file, double click this file to load it up on another computer. This, for the time being, was quicker (I realise not in the long run), but as my Short Term time was limited, I had to resort to it. Basically:

1. Set up one computer with profile and make sure it works
2. In Network Preferences, highlight Airport and click the cog at the bottom of the list
3. Select "Export Configurations..."



Airport Export Configurations...

1. 
   
4. I selected all the settings to export, thought there was no harm in this. Just being comprehensive.



Airport Export Configurations dialogue box

1. 
   

Loading this file on another computer worked just fine. Though in the end I just worked out all I had to change was the the previous System profile used the new Network.

I'll come back to the "networksetup' command line utility though, as it is the proper solution, meaning it could be fully automated - the ultimate solution.

iTunes not recognising IOS device when plugged in

Just got an iPad back from a member of staff and plugged it in to get rid of photos etc. I loaded up iTunes and waited to find it didn't pop up in the list! So I tried my iPhone and the same thing happened. I loaded iPhone Configuration Utility as well to find the iPad did not pop up in that list as well!

One thing I did note was that I had just updated iTunes to version 10.5 about 10 minutes earlier. I did a lot of searching and found quite a few people with this problem. This forum in particular had a lot of posts which might have been of interest. It had a link to this help page which was quite informative.

Before undertaking any fixes I had seen it mentioned that a restart might just fix it so I restarted (with the iPad plugged in) and seems to work fine now. So after all this fiddling, just switching the computer off and back on again does it! Old Skool!

But none the less, I thought it prudent to note this down, and store the help page and forum here.

Lending Library Database Template Current Lending Issues

Well, I do believe that I have a previous post describing my want of a booking out system, and having found the "Lending Library Template", posted here. I've started testing.

One problem found was that if you viewed a persons details (Contact Details form) and clicked on "Current Lending" tab, it would list ALL off the items being lent out to EVERYONE. This of course wasn't the intended design I can imagine, and so is a slight fault.

After doing a few google searches I found two people with the same problem, and the second of which was lucky enough to get talking to an expert. He found the problem to be with the table in the tab. It simply needed "Link Master Fields" to have "ID" and "Link Child Fields" to have "Checked Out To" in the properties.

Change "Linked Masters Fields" to ID and "Linked Child Fields" to Checked out to

This worked a treat. Thank you HiTechCoach

Downloading Photos using Bridge

Downloading Photos using Bridge

OS X - In ‘Finder’ go to Applications > Adobe Bridge CS5 > Adobe Bridge CS5

Windows – Go to Start > Adobe Creative Suite Premium CS5 > Adobe Bridge CS5

Booking out systems for Inventory

The basic idea is to use the current Inventory database and implement a booking out system for the items.

After doing a lot of searching there were no free "ready made" systems.

Found this Lending Library template for Microsoft Access. Absolutely excellent. Just needs a little tweeking.

The ideal situation would be to link the Inventory to this. Just don't know how to do this?

The next best thing is to import all the data.

The B Team

If you have a small problem, if not many people can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire the B-Team.


Basically a "not so good" A-Team. Music hummed by stupid people. Classic.

Managed Preferences not working on a few Apple Macs

I look after about 140 Apple Macs, now with OS X 10.6.6. It was noticed that at least two, in one classroom, were not picking up printers and autologin items specified in Workgroup Manager as a managed preference.

It took a while but I found this forum which gave a good insight into troubleshooting managed preference on the Apple Macs. Here are a few tools:

• Go to About This Mac > System Profiler > Managed Preferences. It will show you what preference are managed, if any.
• From terminal use the command: mcxrefresh
• Also from terminal use: mcxquery - much better then the refresh for troubleshooting

After trying all of these it was apparent that the machine was not picking up anything! Nothing appeared in any of these tools, so I finally referred to Workgroup Manager.

The computer was in the list, with the right MAC address. I finally had a look in the All Computers list and sorted in order of MAC Address. I found that this MAC address was listed twice! I deleted the other instance and what do you know, it worked.

Note: Always check for duplicate entries in workgroup manager!!

Sorted.


To properly refresh the MCX preferences from the client machine logged in as a user you can:

1. Open Terminal
2. Make sure you're a SUDO user
3. type:
1. sudo mcxrefresh -n USERNAME_HERE -a
2. Password:
4. It came up with this error though:
1. 07] CFURLCreateWithString was passed this invalid URL string: '/Applications/Safari.app' (a file system path instead of an URL string). The URL created will not work with most file URL functions. CFURLCreateWithFileSystemPath or CFURLCreateWithFileSystemPathRelativeToBase should be used instead.
5. but it did refresh all information and install the right printers!

Office 2008 and 2011 cannot save or create this file

Upon updating the operating system to OS X 10.6.6, I've found that saving office documents throws up a lot of error messages. It has to be noted that this is only happening for staff logging in through Active Directory. These are the error messages that are coming up:

Word cannot save or create this file. The disk may be full or write-protected.

Word cannot save this document due to a naming or permissions error

The "Word cannot save or create this file" error appeared only for staff saving docx files on an old Server 2000 share.

It is my understanding that the other error ("Word cannot save this document") is cause when saving a .doc file when the .TemporaryItems folder stored in the root directory of the home drive either isn't there or does not have the right permissions. I found this forum which talked a little of the problem

After some searching around I found this very informative webpage on saving issues with Word and other Office applications.

With help from the ICT Technicians we've deduced it is a problem with the staff having home drives on a Windows Server 2000 share, as the students do not have this problem with their home drives on a Windows Server 2003 share.

We hence tried moving a home directory to a Windows Server 2008 share. This fixed the problem of saving .docx files, but we had the .doc error "Word cannot save this document due to a naming or permissions error". I'm assuming this is caused by the .TemporaryItems folder issues, but this needs testing.

Another thing to test was the operating system, as it is suggested that the problem is caused by Apple. It did appear to work very well on OS X 10.6.8, Office 2008 on a Windows Server 2008 share.

We did test this quite extensively, even trying the new Office 2011, which still showed up with error messages.

We now have a few options:

1. Move staff home folders to a Windows Server 2003/2008 share
2. Change the OS X active directory login settings to "Force Local Home", and get a script which automounts their home as a networked volume on login.

The first option is out of my hands but I have started the ball rolling. The second option would mean the users would have to change their habbits, and change always comes with friction. My prefered option is No.1.