[MacTUG] A disturbing bug in Profile Manager

[Donald Duff-McCracken]

I wasted the better part of this afternoon tracking this problem down, and I am still doubting this is really the cause (because it is so ridiculous) so I would like someone to confirm it. :-)

I will assume the following is only familiar to those who are playing with Profile Manager on Lion, or in my case, Mountain Lion.

I was playing the profile settings for a "device group". These control the settings (such as how the dock looks, screen saver, etc) that you want to have for a group of machines. At some point the device group settings ceased working for the machines that I had in the group!

The settings that I applied for individual machines were working, but not for the settings for the device group. I went through the settings one by one and then came to the "Login Items" setting. Using this, I had previously told the client to start "emergstart" (the UW emerg app for the mac) on login. This had been working fine earlier on. However, I remembered I rebuilt my mac client and I had not yet installed the emergstart application. This was causing the problem. If you have Login Items tell the mac client to start an app that is not on your client machine (lets say because you forgot to install it), it causes none of the settings for that Device Group to run! In other words, it effectively kills the settings for that device group.

This is a rather nasty little bug, if someone else can replicate it, as it means that the restraints put on the client from the Device Groups profile, will not be there if an app is missing that you asked to run. It is a bit of a house of cards if this is the case.

Guillermo, since I know you have Profile Manager running, can you do a little test? Can you set up login items to start an app on login that is not on a client* (some app on your server, such as the Server app should suffice) and see what it does?

*This asterisk is for another problem that I am having that is another, smaller kettle of fish: I have a hard time getting login items to recognize other apps other than apple's built in apps. For some reason emergstart is available in the list but other apps I have installed (Firefox, etc) are not. This is a trivial issue as emergestart is the only app I want to run at login at this point in time. But this is curious, nonetheless.
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Donald Duff-McCracken
Technical Services Manager
Mapping, Analysis & Design
Faculty of Environment
University of Waterloo
(519) 888-4567 x32151
https://uwaterloo.ca/environment-computing/about/people/donald-duff-mccracken

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