Macintosh / Panther Refresh

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Today, Dave Gregory and I began discussing the Macintosh refresh. Although the refresh is not scheduled to begin until July 2004, a DARPA staff member has requested a G5 workstation running the Panther operating system. We thought it would be a good time to begin working on what the new image would look like.

Here are some points from the meeting.

1. Outlook 2001 will not work properly in the Panther environment. Panther no longer supports booting into OS 9, which is required to properly configure Outlook 2001. In addition, Outlook 2001 is not S/MIME compliant. This means that it will not work with the DOD PKI and therefore cannot be the mail package of choice.

2. We need to examine the built in firewall which ships with Panther. Perhaps we will not have to purchase the Norton product.

3. Panther also ships with a VPN client and we need to test this to see if it works with the DARPA solution. If so, this will preclude us from having to purchase a seperate product, currently Nortel.

4. We need to verify the forms package works with Panther.

5. Apple Remote Desktop should be installed and configured. This will allow the help desk and engineers to remotely manage the client workstations and will also allow remote software installation and configuration should the need arise.

6. Active Directory. Panther has the ability to allow a user to authenticate against Microsoft's Active Directory. This will be beneficial to us. There will need to be a local administrative account created and also have the root account enabled. The user's domain account will be cached for offline use. The user's domain account will also be allowed to administer the local machine. We need to test the password expiration portion.

7. All software must be placed up onto the network, like the Windows software. In addition, Carbon Copy Clone images of desktop and portable machines should be maintained.

8. Internet browser must be determined. Internet Explorer on the Mac platform is a dead product. In also does not support the DoD PKI very well. Safari also does not support the DoD PKI very well. Netscape and Mozilla both support the DoD PKI for signing and encrypting email as well as using the Common Access Card to access DoD PKI protected websites.

9. Home directory encryption is an option.

10. How are backups to be handled?

-- Anonymous, October 28, 2003


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