I'm the "Administrator" for an elderly neighbor's computers. Their iMac was getting long in the tooth, and the old man wanted to use a large TV as the display, so I helped them find a used 2010 Mac Mini. That's the last year with an optical drive, and first year with an HDMI port. It came to us with Mavericks installed. I have the computer setup to boot into his non-Admin account. And also, we've upgraded it to 16GB of RAM.
The old guy has started to accidentally drag apps off the Dock. I'd drop in for a visit and he'd complain that Mail has disappeared. Or iTunes. Or Firefox. So - some months ago, I enabled Parental Controls and "locked" the dock. This solved the problem.
The old guy is also starting to show signs of dementia. I'm afraid he'll get tricked into installing some Trojan malware. I've already had to clean out various nasties from Firefox.
So anyway, I recently updated the Mini to El Capitan. I enabled the "white listed apps" feature of Parental Controls. The idea was to have yet another layer of protection against malware getting installed. However, I'm now having two problems with Parental Controls:
1) The "white list" feature really doesn't work well. There are so many hidden apps and daemons that need to be enabled for normal use of the computer. They are not shown in the app list in Parental Controls. For example, just to scan documents on his printer, I had to enable several apps from the "you don't have permission" dialog. And then there are the daemons. I thought I enabled them all, but then days later another one popped up.
I'd say this a fail in the design of Parental Controls!
2) We've also started to have a problem where his browser (Firefox) can't go online. Sometimes most of a web page would load - but not embedded videos. Other times nothing loads - and we get a "connection reset by peer" error. (I do not have web filtering enabled - the old guy still likes his pr0n.)
One day his Firefox was getting nothing but the peer errors. Without a restart, I logged out of his account and into the Administrator account. Firefox there had no trouble going online, nor playing youtube videos. Sign back into the old guy's account, and instant peer errors.
When the computer is restarted, at first everything seems OK in his account. These errors only show up (days) later.
I've checked various system logs. I did notice once that the Universal Access daemon (universalaccessd) had crashed - seemingly because of a nil pointer. However, there is so much cruft in the logs that it is hard to find the useful messages.
To fix this second issue, I've had to turn Parental Controls entirely off. However, I expect we'll need this capability in a few months. I hope these El Cap bugs are fixed by then.
BTW, I have an alternate solution in mind: I only recently noticed that this Mini is just old enough to run Snow Leopard... (evil cackle!)
The old guy has started to accidentally drag apps off the Dock. I'd drop in for a visit and he'd complain that Mail has disappeared. Or iTunes. Or Firefox. So - some months ago, I enabled Parental Controls and "locked" the dock. This solved the problem.
The old guy is also starting to show signs of dementia. I'm afraid he'll get tricked into installing some Trojan malware. I've already had to clean out various nasties from Firefox.
So anyway, I recently updated the Mini to El Capitan. I enabled the "white listed apps" feature of Parental Controls. The idea was to have yet another layer of protection against malware getting installed. However, I'm now having two problems with Parental Controls:
1) The "white list" feature really doesn't work well. There are so many hidden apps and daemons that need to be enabled for normal use of the computer. They are not shown in the app list in Parental Controls. For example, just to scan documents on his printer, I had to enable several apps from the "you don't have permission" dialog. And then there are the daemons. I thought I enabled them all, but then days later another one popped up.
I'd say this a fail in the design of Parental Controls!
2) We've also started to have a problem where his browser (Firefox) can't go online. Sometimes most of a web page would load - but not embedded videos. Other times nothing loads - and we get a "connection reset by peer" error. (I do not have web filtering enabled - the old guy still likes his pr0n.)
One day his Firefox was getting nothing but the peer errors. Without a restart, I logged out of his account and into the Administrator account. Firefox there had no trouble going online, nor playing youtube videos. Sign back into the old guy's account, and instant peer errors.
When the computer is restarted, at first everything seems OK in his account. These errors only show up (days) later.
I've checked various system logs. I did notice once that the Universal Access daemon (universalaccessd) had crashed - seemingly because of a nil pointer. However, there is so much cruft in the logs that it is hard to find the useful messages.
To fix this second issue, I've had to turn Parental Controls entirely off. However, I expect we'll need this capability in a few months. I hope these El Cap bugs are fixed by then.
BTW, I have an alternate solution in mind: I only recently noticed that this Mini is just old enough to run Snow Leopard... (evil cackle!)