TameBear has recently been working heroic hours at a small mid-western college, preparing for the start of Fall Semester. More specifically, the Bear has been working to set up a BRAND NEW Macintosh Design Lab for the college, in an IT environment that is agressively anti-Macintosh. The school's network guru says "I think the best solution is to replace all those Macs with PCs!" Notwithstanding the obvious irony -- a Macintosh IS a PC (remember, "PC" means "personal computer") -- the Bear has persevered, and the new lab is UP AND RUNNING a full twelve hours before the first lab class. Have you ever seen a bear sweat?
What a wildtime it has been! The bear, normally a downright lazy bum, prefers to have machines do all the work. But this project called for an unusual rolling up of the sleeves, and good workplace habits averaging over 80hrs/wk. Here is the result...
A Macintosh Design Lab for the graphic design, web design, digital photography, and elementary ed classes, plus a suitable work environment for producing both the school paper and a weekly video news magazine that runs on the closed-circuit channel, plus every production tool the enterprising student needs to run a high-quality design studio out of their local dorm room.
Student and faculty users log in with their LDAP username and password, and their preferences are stored on an OS X v10.2 Server, so they have their own desktop, the desktop background image of their choice or of their making, their own Documents folder, personal iTunes and iPhoto libraries... in short a custom user environment for each member of our community on any Mac Lab computer they log in on. Welcome to the future. One student's evaluation: "All the computer labs should be like this!" (For the record, the large majority of lab computers at this college are running the Microsoft Windows 98.)
How did the Bear pull off such an astounding feat? Start with months of preparation: testing OS X Server v10.1, Macintosh Manager, and various client setups; read the 600-page "Server Administrator's Manual" and related exciting docs like "Using NetInfo"; dig into the big PDF manual for OS X v10.2 Server, browse various forums like macosxlabs, Apple Discussion Forums, and the daily scat sheet Macintouch; and grab your top-notch LDAP professional in an unrelenting bearhug.
Yes, the Bear did it all, and more. The Bear made a pilgrimage to that great city, Chicago Illinois, to the Apple Store in Woodfield Mall, to stand in line with an enormous crowd of incredibly friendly Mac enthusiasts on the evening of August 23, 2002, to be among the first purchasers of Mac OS X v10.2.
OS X v10.2 Server (ordered weeks earlier) arrived within a few days and then Tame moved into high gear. In coming installments the Bear will reveal specific details of how to set up an OS X v10.2 Mac Design Lab, and how to integrate OS X Server into a hostile Windows environment.
8:10:35 PM 
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