Category Archives: Labs

Posts about computer labs and classrooms at Williams College

Mac – Disable/Enable Gatekeeper from command line

Posted on November 24, 2015 by

GateKeeper is the application on Mac OS 10.8 and above that prevents running applications from unknown sources. On the “Lab” image this can not be enabled since many of the older academic software programs would not be able to run. … Continue reading →

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Windows – Google Chrome Forcing Home Page

Posted on October 22, 2015 by

Even if you use the Chrome GPO for settings, you need to set this for the home page of choice … There is a registry setting in : HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\RestoreOnStartupURLs See: https://www.devtxt.com/blog/working-around-group-policy-settings-for-chrome-passwords-and-start-pages

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Software – Locking Preferences for Firefox

Posted on December 5, 2014 by

On some computers like public access kiosks, you want to specifically lock certain firefox preferences so they can’t be changed. For a relatively easy way to do this, see the information at: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Locking_preferences

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Mac – Mavericks — AFP shares need to become SMB shares

Posted on August 14, 2014 by

With Mavericks, Apple is moving farther away from AFP support. It’s time to change our AFP points in our Network Shares to smb pointers. Two commands come in very handy to find and replace the needed text in the files … Continue reading →

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Mac – Setting “default” printer

Posted on July 23, 2014 by

Setting a “default” printer on Mac – Printers are listed to the mac user on the drop down menu in alphabetic order so you need to add “A” to the beginning of the name of the default printer if the … Continue reading →

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k2000 – Update Drivers

Posted on May 8, 2014 by

There are several places where you can “update” drivers in the Windows K2000 deployment server.  In “Library’ — “Driver Feed”  –  search for then click on a model and there is a drivers ‘download and install’ function which may be … Continue reading →

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Mac – Find all copies of files

Posted on February 21, 2014 by

Very useful when wondering if someone added something some where …. Best run as root: find / -name ‘Acrobat*’

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Mac – Set NTP time server from command line

Posted on February 19, 2014 by

Active Directory login, Keyserver access, SafeConnect, etc all require the connecting client to have a time setting that is within 5 minutes or so of the server’s time setting.  It is therefore useful to use a “network time protocol” server … Continue reading →

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Labstats – Remote install and uninstall

Posted on February 17, 2014 by

See the useful information at: http://support.labstats.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/163/0/helpful-installuninstall-commands-for-the-labstats-client

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