Selecting audio ports on Mac Pro’s in lab environments.

December 1st, 2008 by Michael in Greensboro, NC

Where I work, Apple computers is the standard for Communications majors. That being said, we’ve got a few labs with Mac Pro’s and 13 individual editing suites. The edit suites provide the students with a cubical shunned away from the world by a sliding glass door allowing their video creativity juices to flow. In the labs, there is a desktop at the front of the room dedicated for the teacher with wall-mounted speakers and a projector. Although all this hardware looks great on the outside, one issue that came up was audio. Since the change to Intel chips, the three audio sources (headphone, audio speaker and line-out) which if you remember, would auto-switch based on what was plugged in, has now changed to three independent sources. What this means is if a user wants to make any changes to how audio gets routed they must make the change manually. To read more…

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OSX Leopard, Deep Freeze and Active Directory… oh my

August 12th, 2008 by Michael in Greensboro, NC

With the never ending roadblocks I encounter at work, my task this year was to utilize the new 10.5 Leopard operating system (and then some) for a local private university. I’ve used Deep Freeze for many years and it has proved to be a great asset in keeping lab machines consistent. What the Macs haven’t utilized was a way for users to log-in with their username and password. Being a predominant PC campus, Active Directory (AD) will be the choice of Mac’s Directory Service. With all the bad rap Leopard got with Active Directory not working, I luckily was able to get 10.5.4 to bind fine with AD. Glancing into Directory Utility the light was green, all is good. I then sent out the command through Remote Desktop to freeze the machines with Deep Freeze. Moving on to other labs I noticed after 10ish days people started reporting that they read more…

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