ARD - Apple Remote Desktop - Authentication Problem Adding computers to list

I've had a problem with ARD for a long time now and only within the last few weeks found out a work around.

When trying to add new machines to my lists in ARD from the "Scanner", the authentication window pops up for less then 1 second and then disappears! The machine doesn't get added to any list. The same occurs if you try to do anything on an unauthenticated computer (i.e. not in a list) including; view the screen, control the screen, send unix commands etc... I have OS X 10.6.6, but I've had this problem also on 10.5.8, ARD 3, but this problem might have been present in ARD 2 also (it's been a while). I also have a 10.4.11 server running as a Task Server.

Things I tried.

• I thought it might be a problem with the ARD client so I reinstalled and updated, restarted the service.
• It might be a problem at my end. So I've reinstalled ARD, although I've not been brave enough to delete all my plist files and preferences. I could have also tried logging in as another user and adding the machine, this would have ruled out my preferences.

I finally just tried adding a machine manually (in the bottom left corner + sign of a computer list), all you need is the IP address and authentication details (username and password) and it worked perfectly.

Note (26-07-2012): Well, I finally figured it out (a year later). Turns out it's a conflict with IP addresses. We use DHCP addressing here, and if an IP address hasn't been used in a while it'll get given to another computer. I've replaced a few old ones and a couple had taken the IP addresses of the older macs. When I tried adding them it would notice another one in its' list with that IP address and not know what to do.

To fix, simply find the computer with the same IP address in the master list, right click and get info. Delete the IP address (as it obviously isn't that anymore), and adding the new machine will work perfectly.

OS X Active Directory login issues - UnBind

I've seen this problem ever since we started putting Apple Macs on the Active Directory domain. Every now and then OS X will shake at login. I've rebooted and reset PRAM, fsck -yf, checked the time and date, and looked at the active directory settings in Directory Utility. The only real fix is to "Unbind" it and then "Bind" it again.

The only thing which comes to mind is perhaps the length of time it is not logged into is too long and the computer gets removed from Active Directory. Re-binding it puts it back in the list's.

printing on the HP Designjet 500

Printing on the designjet 500 has proved a little problematic as we are constantly coming up with "printer out of memory" errors. It has been mentioned that the "maximum detail" tick box fixes the issue but doesn't seem to fix ours. The print driver we're using is the "HP DesignJet 500PS42+HPGL2 Card"

After a few trials and errors I found there to be a limit on the physical size of the document you want to print. I have a 42" roll installed, for which there are no preset sizes so "Custom" size has to be made. When trying to print 42" by 58" it comes up with the error. But when printing the exact same document at 42" by 31" it works fine. I think the biggest successful print so far is 42" by 45". Here's a screenshot of the settings.

I've first tried changing the "print quality" settings but none seemed to fix the error. I did notice a slight difference in file size sent to the printer though.

After a few days, I set up the printer on another computer, still going through the print server, but this printer preferences looked different. It had an "avoid out of Memory" tick box, which upon clicking notified that processing would be done on the computer and may take a little longer. But, it worked! Here's a screenshot:

The only drawback was that when we tried sending a queue, they seem to all disappear! This could have been down to the Print Management system - PaperCut as I set up a release station for this printer (so no-one can print on our nice paper)

-Note 05/11/2012

Just a quick note. I noticed if I set it to Maximum Detail and unticked "autorotate" it seemed to print without problems.

Imaging OS X 10.6.6 on OS X server 10.4.11

I have over 100 Macs which need reimaging this summer. To make it nice and simple they will all have 10.6.6 installed. Unfortunately I only have a 10.4.11 server (PPC) which I don't think will be upgraded before summer ends! At the moment I have 9 brand new 27" iMacs which don't like the current version of Deploy Studio RC20.

The reason I only have RC20 installed it that this was the last version to support OS X 10.4.11. Now, I also have 9 24" new'ish iMacs which do work with Deploy Studio RC20, and some relatively new Mac Pro's which definitely work with Deploy Studio RC20. So it is still worth perhaps using it for the 90 or so Macs and resort to other techniques to reimage the 9 which don't work. Of course over time I will need a new system but to have a really good new system we'll need time.

So the plan is to carry on using deploy studio for 90% of the Macs, and resort to something else for the last 10%. Alternatives are:

• Carbon Copy Cloner
• SuperDuper
• The install disk
• the install disk on a removable hard drive
• A bootable 10.6.6 on a removable hard drive

Well, I've looked up CCC and can't find any reference to it having some bootable interface. It simply copies a hard drive to another, which to be fair could be bootable, so I might do this.

I'm currently trying the easiest of these which is to use the install disk. I've managed to find the command line for mounting an AFP share. So I've open terminal from the booted up install disk and typed:

mkdir /Volumes/tmp
mount -t afp afp://username:password@server.somewhere.ac.uk/Images/ /Volumes/tmp/

The image that was taken from the 10.6.6 27" iMac was either done in DeployStudio helper or Disk Utility. When trying to restore this image to a drive in Disk Utility it has come up with an error message:

Restore Failure Could not find any scan information. The source image needs to be imagescanned/scanned for restore

I did a quick search and came up with this. I do now remember that to restore off a network share using disk utility it does need to be scanned for restore. Put the image in Disk Utility and go to: Image > Scan for Restore. This takes a long time on the old Apple Server G4, but not so long on the new 27" iMacs!

It should be ready for restore now...

Restored 70GB compressed in 1 hour 45 over the old network, which isn't too bad. I don't think it'll be able to do multiple machines very efficiently though.

The next process is to try and create or use an old netboot image to netboot the slightly older machines. So it only gets easier from this moment onwards.

Microsoft Office 2008 console errors

I've recently been trying to image a new iMac 27". So I've had to install a great many Applications and tested them out. I had a few problems with Adobe InDesign so on looking in the console log I found a lot of reference to Microsoft!

Microsoft Word[35252]: CGBitmapContextGetData: invalid context

Anyway, I did a search and found this which basically says that Microsoft has not done a good job in porting office over to mac, and hence has a lot of misc console messages.

Staff Photos - Use Access to change file names

I've got a nice little Access Database which holds a table of staff members, and another linking the staff to a photo file location. I then use a query to find members of a specific department with a photo and make a tiled report i.e. a staff board with names and job titles.

I've recently been asked to make the staff photos available for everyone, but the problem is they would not want to use the database in its present state (it doesn't look too pretty) and all the photos are still sorted in the folders corresponding to the photo-shoot date and still have their original file name. The question has come up - Can I get Access to rename the photos to say the staff name?

Well, I've done a bit of research (a google search) and it looks like to use access I'd have to do a bit of programming!! But there is this ingenious solution. Basically:

1. Export a excel file of staff name and picture file location
2. open excel and format it so that you get each row to say "ren \Photoshoot1\DSC00342.jpg \ArtAndDesign\StephenBleach.jpg"
3. Then you can make a *.BAT file with a whole list of these commands and "bobs your uncle" you have renamed all the files and it'll only have taken about 30 mins. 

You can even adapt it to put them in directories according to Department! Genius!

But, rather then doing all this, I'd rather the college had a better system (i.e. not me) of gathering and sorting staff photos using some centralised system which everyone can take advantage of.

Setting up the new 27" iMacs

Setup started with the simple "hold down the n button" to netboot/netinstall. The first problem was that the current netinstall image would not work on the new iMacs, doh! So I set about making a new one. The old deploy studio RC20 seems to crash whilst making an image, so I needed to use a newer one. This newer one imaged without crashing, but when netbooting came up with a message saying the server needed updating to cope with the new netboot image.

The next thing I tried was to put an iMac in target disk mode and just reimage it using a 24" imac with I know works. I put the Mac Pro 10.6.6 image on it but would not boot up. This was probably due to new drivers not being on the image!

My last attempt is to start from scratch (or nearly from scratch) and install everything. I updated the operating system to the latest 10.6.8. I took a shortcut though and used "Migration Assistant" to pull across applications from the 10.6.6 image. This worked and only required me to install the newest of things. Heres a list of things which is now on the new iMac:

• Adobe CS5
• Final Cut Studio
• Firefox 4
• Acrobat 9 Pro
• Papercut client
• Celtx
• Office 2008 (required rosetta)
• Handbrake

And drivers

• Scanwizard
• Dell 3110 driver
• Pixma Driver
• Konica Driver
• HP Scanner 4370
• Wacom tablet
• Flip4Mac

After all this I tried a students account. It required 2 login attempts to get me in though. I then tried all the apps. The problems I encountered were:

• Photoshop crash on launch
• Illustrator crash on launch
• Indesign crash on launch
• Acrobat crash on launch

These were probably due to NHR (network home relocation) script not installed. I installed it and Photoshop and Acrobat started working. Unfortunately Illustrator nor InDesign would work! They worked perfectly fine on a local login. I ran the CS5 install again, and also updated Illustrator to 15.0.2 and InDesign to 7.0.4. Illustrator would crash on load up, and indesign would crash on the "new document" screen which comes up first. My only clue was a message which popped up in console which I can't quite remember now. Something to do with transport2app error 255.

Just relogged in and tried it again. The error's I'm getting from the console are:

07/07/2011 14:01:43 kernel smbfs_vnop_link: warning: pid 665(Adobe Illustrato) hardlink(~v3vZO_cBdNvr4jqB)

07/07/2011 14:01:49 mdworker32[673] kCGErrorFailure: Set a breakpoint @ CGErrorBreakpoint() to catch errors as they are logged.

07/07/2011 14:01:51 mdworker[658] CFPropertyListCreateFromXMLData(): Old-style plist parser: missing semicolon in dictionary.

The first refers to the smbfs (samba file system) which must be the home drive of the student which is hosted on a windows share.

The only real difference is that the operating system in 10.6.8 instead of 10.6.6. I think I will have to redo this on a 10.6.6 machine....

So, redone a 10.6.6 version and migrated everything from 10.6.8 iMac. Everything worked! (apart from Adobe Acrobat and Dreamweaver. Acrobat crashes and dreamweaver gets stuck even loading up. I installed NHR and still the same. Interestingly Illustrator worked without NHR!

Looking into the issue a little more, I found that NHR is not entirely working. I've noticed that the caches folder is not being relocated, although the fonts folder is? I will have to look into this further. At the time I thought this was due to the test account having the links set up already from another machine, but thinking about it now these links should be deleted on logout! So now I'm thinking about it, it was originally working and now somehow it is not working any longer.