Not that I usually have bad days that is.

Today I finally got my head around what was hindering my progress on the imaging of well over a hundred Core 2 Duo iMacs at work.

Thing is though, in the meantime I figured out another possible answer to another problem.

Let’s say you’ve got intel macs in a mixed windows and netware network, the macs rely on local student logins, because [1] the os x server isn’t high enough spec to handle logins for the amount of students who’d need them [300 plus with a minimum of 50 logged in at any one time] [2] there isn’t enough space on it, let alone bandwidth in the infrastructure to get to it and [3] there isn’t a lot of point anyway – most of the stuff they’re doing revolves around massive iMovie and Final Cut projects.

[layman speak; all 100+ macs run as stand alone, the only thing that's networked, is the internet. A student can't make a movie project on one computer, save it to the network and then log in to another computer in another building to finish it.]

For the larger projects that’s fine, I can handle that – getting the kids to save their work to the local machine and remembering what workstation they were at is a given, it’s a headache for them at first but they soon get used to it.

There are so many other things though, getting os x to play nice in a netware and windows network is like someone trying to tell me that jumping in front of a bus is an amazing idea. I’m sure if you were skilled enough, that you could convince me, but it’d take a lot of doing. So many things have to be played with, and the last thing I want to do is play around with schema’s and things from the netware back-end, and I definitely don’t want to play around with Kanaka [which broke my macbook briefly last year] or Prosoft’s client [hell mama nooo].

Without having the workstation authenticate to netware, bordermanager is forced to authenticate in-browser, which is shite, cause then a student can log in, browse for five minutes, then leave the workstation, someone else comes along in the next two minutes, continues browsing and decides to go check out meatspin or dan’s gallery or lots of pr0n sites or something. Bordermanager will still think that the first student is browsing, because the second one is using his/her login. Neither of them know, or care, that’s just the way the mac system has worked the last couple of years.

Don’t get me started on the os x client for groupwise.

So, two things then, the main pro/iLife apps will run fine under local student logins per machine, which the students are used to, but there are so many other niggly little things that could be ironed out. A-la groupwise, iPrint support, mounting network shares that any windows box in the network will do automagically, proper bordermanager support, better access to the user’s central home drive, not to mention the needs of teachers – access to our register taking software, vendor locked to windows… etc, etc.

and then it hit me.

Why pay out for a buggy, expensive netware login for os x, when you can just use window’s own?

Run a small, optimized VM install of 2000/XP on each student mac, sans-desktop [the current VM apps can take the windows from er, windows, and place them directly on os x's desktop]. The user can be logged into the mac and have all the access to it’s suite of software that they need for their lessons, and for more mundane [read - functional] tasks, they can log into the VM as themselves, on the same desktop, and have access to all the crappy little windows apps that they always complain about not having on the macs. I can even have the VM’s browser set as the default for the system, so that bordermanager can work as it’s supposed to.

The best bit, as I was explaining to my [very excited] boss, is that it’ll be totally transparent [or at least will be rigged in such a way] – the student won’t realise that there’s two machines there, thanks to the way that Parallels and VMware Fusion can strip the windows install of it’s desktop and put all apps on the os x desktop. You’ll turn on the mac, it’ll auto-login to the student account and up pops the netware login prompt, ready for full-on connection to the back end

With a bit of tinkering, I’m sure I can make os x put all the windows mounted drives on it’s own desktop.

It’ll be a little while away, and I hope to get at least one class running it as a test for the first few weeks of term – a class full of all-singing, all-dancing winmacs!

I will have a few things to work around though, having VMs run in the machines may slow them down a fair bit, I don’t want it to impede iMovie or Final Cut’s performance, perhaps a little dock applet that can pause/shut down the machine.

If anyone’s got any ideas on this I’d be really grateful of some pointers!

Ben