Snow Leopard Deployment Issues

Collection of assorted issues that came up deploying some OS 10.6 "Snow Leopard" iMacs.

  • Adobe Acrobat Crashes on OS X With Network Account - an alternative way of achieving this solution, since we have OS X Server, was to use MCX to automatically redirect the folders for network users:
    Action - deleteAndCreateSymblink
    Destination Folder Path - /Users/Shared/9.0_x86/
    Folder Path: ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat/9.0_x86

    To make sure that other users will be able to access /Users/Shared/9.0_x86, give it full write privileges (i.e. chmod ugo+w /Users/Shared/9.0_x86)

  • "Invalid License file or Host ID" while launching QLA Server on Snow Leopard - this kbase article didn't quite solve the issue when trying to run the QLA server as a background service. In order to get it to run, had to edit /Applications/Quark/Quark_License_Administrator/Server/.QLAServer.sh and insert a "-d32" after java in java -classpath ...
  • Cannot save document with Network Homes - issue affects TextEdit, AppleScript Editor, MS Office. "Save" would not work though "Save As..." would work properly. It's an issue with the user's .TemporaryItems folder and Network Home Directories. Possibly also related to redirecting the user's Cache to a local drive.
    See Folder Redirection & Microsoft Office 2008 for details on the issue. Basically, your User share needs to have a world (or group) writeable .TemporaryItems folder.
    cd /path/to/Users
    sudo mkdir .TemporaryItems
    chgrp staff .TemporaryItems
    chmod 1770 .TemporaryItems

    See also this article at My God, it's Full of Macs!"

  • Quark Preferences not saving - probably a similar issue as above. Who knows where Quark tries to save the prefs first. "Solved" this by creating a Preferences folder within the Quark application folder - not ideal as the user's then all have a shared set of prefs.
    Also, ran into an issue with the jaws folder in there that has the font caches - those files need to be writeable for all users, not just the user who created them. In order to achieve that, I added a loginhook to the workstations that erases the jaws folder contents.
  • Pushing Adobe Serial Number to workstations - due to some screw-ups with single-user versus multi-user upgrade licenses, my original NetInstall disk image had CS4 installed in trial mode, without a valid serial number. Adobe's knowledge base had an article on how to update/remove a serial number from a copy of CS4. Copying [startup drive]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PCD, [startup drive]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/caps, and [startup drive]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/backup to the workstations (using Apple Remote Desktop) deployed the new serial information to the clients.
  • Finder forgets last folder position - fsck this is irritating! With network home directories, Snow Leopard defaults "Save As" defaults to the user's Documents folder.
  • Finding Files - Gawd, Spotlight just sucks at quickly finding a file by name on a volume! Here's a couple utilities that work better:
  • Duplicate entries in the /Volumes folder
    Volumes mounting with "-1"
    forum thread on macosxhints.com
    Hidden file called .autodiskmounted?

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