Lab Headaches This Week

I find myself looking at what I have written to remember what I have done!! So I am trying to add more of the things I learn to my blog as I have in the past (New Years Resolution 13).

We have upgraded to Yosemite so I am back working through some issues. One of my workflows in using my class iBook with students is to send the book to a shared folder on a local account on each lab computer. I use Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) to do this. It makes it a bit easier as I do not have to send the file to each of my students’ desktop. I had students go to that folder and create an alias to the iBook, copy the alias to their desktop and open up the class iBook. This didn’t work all that well last semester. Students would delete the alias they made, delete or move the iBook in the shared folder. So, before break, I created an Automator application that when clicked opens the iBook.

Screen Shot 2015-01-14 at 2.54.14 PM
My Incorrect Setup

So this week I sent the iBooks off to the shared folder as I used to in the first semester but when students clicked on the Automator application nothing would open. I thought this might be because of the way privileges were setup on the shared folder. After a bit of testing I found I was right. I then tried to change permissions on the folder via Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) and send a UNIX command but found it  wasn’t setup to do that. After a bit of searching on the Apple forums I found that the share settings in Remote Management was wrong for ARD. For some reason Open and Quit Applications was not selected.

After I logged in and added this I could change the permissions in the share folder to allow students to open the file and the Automator application was fine. So I can distribute my book updates as I did before.

Still have two machines that are not up and running have reset PRAM, booted into safe mode and ran disk utilities so far no changes. Hopefully it is as easy as yesterday when I tried, deleting com.apple.Bluetooth.plist, resetting the SMC, to fix Bluetooth issues and could not solve the problem. Replacing the batteries with a different brand (both were 1.5 volts), however, did the trick.

The Next day safe boot and a permission fix worked!!