The Design and Implementation of laffer1

I'm preparing for class, but I had an opportunity to work with the 10.5.1 update for 10 minutes. First observations:

1. The firewall dialog has changed.  Instead of fixing it, they changed the text to something logical.  "Allow only essential services"   Better, but I want more control over the firewall. A "quick list" of built in OS X apps and services to allow is a good start. 
   
2. Mail closes MUCH faster.  It is like night and day.  I'm quite happy with that.
3. The finder seems to be working subtly better.  I don't know what it is, but it "feels" better.
4. After another reinstall my wacom tablet is working.  I don't know if that will last
5. It's a 40mb update.  Not "small"

I've been asked to find a solution to using boot camp at work.  We need to image 20-30 machines in a dual boot setup.  According to various sources there are only a few options.

1. Netrestore.  The idea here is that you'd setup a Mac and make copies.  Windows must be on a NTFS volume.

2. dd.  This old friend can duplicate a disk including the GPT/MBR hybrid needed to boot OS X and Windows.  Of course if your drive is another size, you are out of luck. 

3. Manually setting up each machine with boot camp.  This one is out.

4. Imaging the machine as normal for OS X and then using a Bart PE disk customized with the OS X drivers for Intel macs to use Windows ghost.  Of course this breaks the Microsoft EULA for Windows.  I do like ghost, and this one is interesting.  We do not have a license that I can use in the CS department. 

I'm leaning toward the dd solution.  We could do that with a Mac OS X boot on firewire which Kirk is into right now.  I could script it pretty easily.  I can't find a firewire cable to test it tonight though.  I really do want to try this. 

There are further limitations.  GPT does not support extended partitions.  MBR does not support more than 4 partitions.  The combination means you can't use extended or more than 4 primary partitions.  One is used by EFI.  That gives you a maximum of three partitions for this to work in hybrid mode.  Windows must be on the last partition. 

Some people can get os x, linux and windows triple booting by using a third party boot loader.  The apple loader doesn't support triple boot effectively. 

Kirk has proposed multibooting OS X, OS X and Windows.  I'm not sure if that will work or not with Apple's software.  (10.4, 10.5 and XP)

I think I might have written an entry about LDAP previously, however I feel that I should write a second entry.

I have successfully authenticated a MidnightBSD machine against an Mac OS X server (10.4.10). 

Ports needed:  nss_ldap, pam_ldap

Create a shared config file in /usr/local/etc
ldap.conf or nss_ldap.conf


# Your LDAP server. Must be resolvable without using LDAP.
# Multiple hosts may be specified, each separated by a
# space. How long nss_ldap takes to failover depends on
# whether your LDAP client library supports configurable
# network or connect timeouts (see bind_timelimit).
host YOURSERVERIP

# The distinguished name of the search base.
base dc=od,dc=cs,dc=emich,dc=edu
base dc=od,dc=cs,dc=emich,dc=edu
nss_base_passwd cn=users,dc=od,dc=cs,dc=emich,dc=edu?one
nss_base_shadow cn=users,dc=od,dc=cs,dc=emich,dc=edu?one
nss_base_group          cn=groups,dc=od,dc=cs,dc=emich,dc=edu?one


nsswitch.conf needs this:

group: files ldap
group_compat: nis
hosts: files dns
networks: files
passwd: files ldap
passwd_compat: nis
shells: files
shadow: files ldap

There are also some things in pam.d

This is not "complete" by any means.  I was also able to nfs mount the home directories too.  There are some issues with X11 and locking in this setup but I haven't had time to refine the approach.

http://www.twocanoes.com/winclone/

This software allows you to clone NTFS boot camp images.  Combining this with a script would probably work out well.