multiple users MacOs X

[Ulrich Reiter]

Hi all,

we are a university with lots of students working with the PT|24 MIX. Problem is, that under OS9 there is no user administration possible together with PT5. Every student is admin on the computer, which makes projects quite unsafe in the course of a semester... [img]images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]

We would like to upgrade to PT6 running on OS X while keeping our MIX hardware - but this makes only sense to us if there is a better way of user administration, meaning that students have to login (not as admin though) in order to work with ProTools. Is this possible with PT6??

Thanks a lot,

Ulrich

[jimlongo]

Yes you can give each user an account that is their own. No one else has access to it. They can privately store their projects in their user account. The downside is that everyone is recording to and working on the system drive.

They could also have their projects on other volumes but they wouldn't be as private (the projects that is). This is the cleanest option.

I suppose another option is to have the session files in their user account but the drive allocation pointed at other volumes, never tried that.

There is also an option to have the user accounts reside on separate volumes from the system. I think you can find out about how to do that here.

The application of course has to be installed by an admin user.

[Chief Technician]

I served as a Macintosh tech at a University for 2 years. They had eight Pro Tools systems, with other software installed as well. I share your pain.

The problem with Multi-User in Mac OS 9 was that only the admin user had the right to do things with the System Folder. This ability was needed for Pro Tools and Finale (among others) to function properly, so Multi-User wasn't the boon it could've been.

I'm not sure if a limited user (as opposed to an "admin" category user) in Mac OS X can use Pro Tools. My initial response would be no (for the same reasons above), but I won't know until you try it and report back.

[jimlongo]

Yes this is true, you must be logged in as an admin user to launch ProTools.

Sorry

[Frank Kruse]

Originally posted by Jim Longo:
Yes this is true, you must be logged in as an admin user to launch ProTools.

Sorry

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">this is so stupid! now that there is a real multi-user system of course it works with every program except with PT! i couldn´t believe my eyes when i tried to log in as a user and PT refused to start.

frank.

[sdemott]

I've suggested this a bunch of times during other discussions. Here is how to make OS X secure when using Pro Tools in a lab environment.

* create an admin user for Pro Tools, lets call it Pro Tools (shortname ptmix) for clarity.

* set all system & user preferences as you want them to be.

* use the padlock icon on the preference panes to "lock down" the settings.

* be sure to lock down the Keychain Access application (Applications > Utilities > Keychain Access).

* now set this account to auto login at boot time.

* tell no one the password to this account.

Now, you have an admin account for Pro Tools, but the average user cannot change, add or augment the system since they will require a password for confirmation before any of those actions (and since all the preferences are locked down, they cannot mess with system settings without a password). Login is as easy as startup (or rebooting) the system, since this is the default "auto login" account.

Though still not perfect, this is far superior to the way OS 9 handled users (everyone had root access in OS 9 - multi-user startup was buggy at best and was relatively easy to circumvent).

Hope this helps.