Snow Leopard – The Journey to Find the Directory Utility

Today I was immersed in Snow Leopard,

I would like to start off by saying I am very pleased with the speed improvement in this system. Finder itself looks to have gotten a great speed boost and most of the core apps I tried launched within 2 bounces. Today, I spent the whole day with the new operating system Installing, Troubleshooting, and using it.

I had two Mac Pro’s one new and one from about a year ago, both needing to be upgraded to Snow Leopard and both needing to be bound to our windows network. The upgrade on both machines went smooth but on one machine I had to migrate the users data back onto it from a clone I made before the upgrade procedure. Migration couldn’t have been easier it even transfered the CS3 design premium. I then found out that the migration assistant also cause a few of the migrated apps to stop working. Klondike, IMovie, and Illustrator had all quit working. But that was not a big deal to fix, I simply removed their preferences and they launched. My next step however, proved to be more difficult than expected. I had to bind the computers to our Windows domain so that the users could access all of our internal resources.

Normally, I just open the utilities folder, open the Directoy Utility and Setup the Active Directory Portion. Viola! Done. Well… not that easy this time.

In Apple’s defense it is a ton easier and more logical the way they have it now but it sure did cause me about 5 minutes of grief as I tried to search spotlight for directory… yeah there where a ton of results I even downloaded Pacifist and tried to install the Directory Utility that way. But alas I could never get it to work. So I went to the second machine and it wasn’t on it either. So now I knew there wasn’t something wrong with my install as these where two separate installs. So then I started digging through the new features page at Apple.com and saw the new ICal integration. So I opened ICal and Ahoy… there is a connect to an exchange server option.. whoohoo I thought. So I went through the motions setting this up and it sure did pull in the calendar of the user and even associated Mail to their username. But alas there was still no connection to log-in users to the domain. So my next step lead me to the system preferences and Accounts tab. and finally at the bottom right of the login options screen I found an item that said “Network Account Server” so I clicked it and there was my directory utility. Finally I Found it, plugged in the info and then it worked like normal.

I will try to post some pics tomorrow, I am sorry I don’t have them tonight I just thought it would be best to get this info out there just in case there was a user going through the same problems as me.

Thanks for reading
David Bates

Why Apple

You can’t deny it with the introduction of the IPod, IPhone, IMac, and now Snow Leopard Apple is gaining and gaining fast on Microsoft. Everybody that I have spoken to admit’s that they secretly want a mac… they talk about apple as though it where an affair, as though it would be cheating on their pc to get one. They simply lust after Apple’s Products. (ok admitedly a little extreme but still you get the point.) Mac’s are here and everybodys talking about them. Why you may ask? because they are sexy, they are top of the line, and the advertising behind them is undeniably better than Microsoft’s. I am not only talking about the two guys pretending to perpetuate to be computers or the many people saying they want a mac on Microsoft’s ads. but also the advertising on their websites. Take a look at the screenshots below.

Click for larger image
First let’s say the obvious do you want a computer to build a resume? Or do you want a sexy cat with snow on it
Second Microsoft is not featuing it’s products on it’s homepage. Other than the tabs across the top I see no mention of windows, no pricing, I see no features. I see no mention of how fast windows is or how it supports a ton of hardware compared to the Mac. All I see is the news section where it even references Apple showing off it’s new version of office for OSX.

There was a toyota commercial that summed it up for me… “Everybody keeps saying how they were like the Camry so I bought a Camry” Makes sence to me… I have an IPhone for that very reason.

Thanks for reading
David Bates