Couple of things - internal speaker and disk image

[socalboomer]

Hi,

I lost my Mac guy (who wasn't so much on writing stuff down or showing anyone what he was doing. . .) so am figgering this stuff out.

I just got 3 shiny new iMacs (2 17" and 1 20") in my primary academic lab. It's a multi-user environment so I can't have the internal speakers going. . .I can order my PCs without them OR can just pop them open and unplug the speaker.

Mute is not an option (too easy to unmute. . .college kids are smart! )
Seems that the admin account muting it doesn't actually mute it for all users. . .or force the mute such that normal users can't unmute it.

Also - I really would like to keep the headphones enabled so mute kinda sucks.

Any ideas?


Second - I'm used to imaging PCs. Takes 15 minutes to take an image of a PC (and ends up being about 3 Gigs when all the academic software has been installed - and I call that big. . .) and about 12 minutes to restore. I used CarbonCopy to take an image of one of the 17's and it took HOURS (I partitioned, took image of the installation partition and dumped it on the "image storage" partition on the machine that was doing the imaging - I used Target mode) and is taking hours to restore. . . Plus, it's 8 Gigs. . .

Am I on cracque and doing things bassackwards? I read as much as I could find so I THINK I'm on the right track. . . Why so huge and why so long?

Thanks for the assistance!

 

[MikeTheC]

The first thing that occurs to me is you could simply keep headphones plugged in 100% of the time to these systems. That would disengage the built-in speakers. It would probably be the quickest and cheapest and least warranty-voiding option you'd have.

Please try and understand: PCs are and always have been built around more utilitarian concepts of design than Macs are or have been. Buying a PC is like buying a Chevy or a Ford, and then picking through a verisimilitude of options, and simply not choosing the ones you don't want. Macs are like Porches or BMWs or Lexuses: They pretty much come with all the nice, high-end options as standard, and trying to "un-pick" them is akin to having at the doors and dashboard with an axe or a chain-saw, trying to cut them off.

Kinda ugly visual, isn't it? Anyhow...

As far as imaging HDDs, I'll leave that for someone else to comment on, since I really have no experience in doing that, either with PCs or on Macs.

All I'll say about it, though, is that the bulk of the support industry out there is built around PCs running Windows. There may be options beyond Carbon Copy Cloner, and I'm simply unaware of them. But then the only Macs I maintain are my own, and all I care about is occasionally backing up my own data.

Good luck!

 

[socalboomer]

Mike - thanks for the input. I don't agree with the analogy, but that's not for this thread! I love my high-powered "Dodge" PC at home. . .

Anyway - I've taken a headphone plug and stuck it in the jack on the back of each for now - thanks for the suggestion. It's inelegant, but hopefully will take care of the situation for now.

As much as Mac is marketed toward education, I'd think someone somewhere would have the type of management solution that I have for my lab PCs. . .at least I'm HOPING!

 

[mkrishnan]

More of a general comment...

If you look at the System Preferences -> Accounts pane, you will see the list of accounts available on the left. Each one will have a designation -- "Administrator," "Standard Account," and so on. Your users, either individually (if they each login) or as a "guest" account if it's just left logged into it, should have the "managed account" level. You can use this to limit which programs they can run, prevent them from changing system preferences, etc. This is not easy for them to get around, as long as they don't have access to system install DVDs and you don't give them the admin password.

I think you *might* be able to disable access to system preferences in this way and then, through the admin account, disable the internal speaker in the sound pane. Then they won't be able to turn it back on. But I have to go home and look at that. You might even be able to dig up the .kext (driver) that's associated with the internal speaker and delete it, but I'm less sure about that and it's riskier.

Alternatively read this thread: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=46616

 

[socalboomer]

Thanks for the link. It talks about cracking the case and I have NO idea how to go about doing that. . .there's no obvious or slightly evident way to do that. . .

I only have one account actually ON the machine itself - they're bound to the Active Directory and I haven't figured out how to give groups (like domain\students) levels of rights. . .