I have this nice little computer lab next off of my main lab/shop space. There is room for 13 or so workstations. In the beginning, this was a mixed space with half Mac and half Windows PCs. In talking with my counterpart at our other middle school, he preferred PCs and I the Macs, so we traded. I like the Macs mostly because I have control over them, if they where PCs I would have to rely on the undermanned tech department for support.
When I had PCs, it seemed that they would brake, our tech would come fix a day later… Then when it came time for the same activity next quarter, they wouldn’t be working right again. With the Macs I have control, I build the master image and copy it out to the rest of the lab. I can tweak things as needed, I can fix issues right away.
This new lab I have done something new, I am joining the Macs to the districts Active Directory (AD) Domain. For those of you that don’t know AD is a major component of Microsoft Windows networking. The advantage here is that my students can now use their AD user names and passwords in my lab, they couldn’t do that before. We are still limited to just authentication, I have hacked the Mac OS X “User Template” to control certain aspects of the environment. However, the next big challenge is to get the student’s network drive to mount automatically. The difficulty is the fact that Im not using a Mac OS X Server to act as a intermediary between the Mac OS X clients and AD.
Here are a few pictures of the new lab, and stay tuned for details of setting up a Mac lab the way I have.
