a shrine of insignificance

I am a System Administrator and have been giving the task of setting up a bunch of Macs our lab recently purchased with the hope it will integrate nicer with our Linux servers than Windows boxes. It has been a nightmare. The machine begins by demanding I create a local account, which I don’t want since I am setting up NIS. Demanding personal information, and a photograph and then tries to send the invasive information back to you. The machine freaks and deadlocks since it is not connected to the internet yet and eventually becomes responsive again and wants to try again. Fortunately I can skip at this point. Once this is done I then have to wait three hours for the drop in disk to upgrade the system, yet a Windows or Linux installation takes at most an hour. The system came bundled with a bunch of useless music and movie editing application and no productivity software except for trials, yes trials, of iWork and Microsoft Office. I thought you could do work on the mac? The airport adapter is slow when it works, which it usually does not. Frankly, I’m getting close to installing Linux on the thing and skipping the headaches and I haven’t yet started NIS/NFS integration which online everyone agrees is a pain. The powers that be even suggest we migrate EVERY OTHER MACHINE to LDAP authentication because it may be easier than getting the Mac to work with NIS. I thought these were more than toys.

Filed under: General on November 20th, 2007