ULabMin 0.5.1

By: James Reynolds - Revised: 2006-06-01 devin


Introduction

ULabMin is a collection of scripts, tools, applications, and other customizations that manage a semi-public lab of Mac OS X computers. The University of Utah Student Computing Labs Mac Group is making this available so that it can be deployed in labs other than those maintained by the Student Computing Labs.

The initial release of ULabMin is intended for those who are willing to spend time figuring out how this all works. Alot still needs to be done to make this "usable" by anyone. There is currently no GUI manager to setup ULabMin.

ULabMin is version .5 because it isn't a good "public" utility because it isn't easy to install. However, SCL is using it actively to manage about 350+ Macs that perform different functions such as authenticated lab/staff workstation, autologin kiosks, authenticated kiosk, presentation computers (video out is piped to LCD's spread out through lab), and firewire "Image" drives. It is basically a 2.0 utility for us. 1.0 was so bad we couldn't even make small changes without breaking it... That is why this is 2.0 for us.

Note: we will be updating ULabMin fairly regularly since we have a long list of things to add and we are currently working on it.


Third Party Applications

ULabMin includes a number of 3rd party applications and scripts. Here are the links to the original websites (where you can get updated versions, if they exist).

Menuversum - Menuversum
ncutil - ncutil
Radmind - Radmind
iHook - iHook
Screen Preserver - There currently is no Screen Preserver webpage. It is by RSUG, er, Andrew of RSUG, same guys who wrote Radmind.
SecureIt - SecureIt

Key Files

(links removed)

Here are links to a few of key files of ULabMin.

assimilateUser.pl
create_crontab.pl
createHomeFolderBackups.pl
cron_minutely.pl
cron_nightly.pl
cron_setting
find_writable.pl
idlescript.pl
killsumapps.pl
labsingleuser.pl
launch_maintenance_kindly
launch_maintenance.pl
loginhook.pl
logouthook.pl
lostAndFoundReadme
MAC_address_names
maintenance_status.pl
newPresentation.pl
post_maintenance.pl
report_to_master.sh
run_radmind.pl
secure_system.pl
set_computer_name.pl
startup_script.pl
tracker.pl
updateByHostPrefs.sh

Changes

11.03.03 - ULabMin 0.5.1 has the graphics removed from the download file. The graphics are now on a separate page. /System/Library/StartupItems/LoginWindow/StartupParameters.plist is no longer corrupt.