I've found a few issues with this last upgrade for Apple OS 10.3. The first and biggest one revolved around a problem wherein people would run the update and then their system would freeze upon rebooting. It got to the login screen and would not go any further no matter how long you would wait.
The problem doesn't ever affect people who have an admin account on the system because their accounts are able to properly overwrite the files that need to be changed, but for people with restricted accounts, it will sometimes be an issue and sometimes not. I thought that the problem may have revolved around Font Reserve or some other software installed on the machine, but all of the tests myself and co-workers did proved so inconclusive that I don't know for certain where the problem could be.
There are a series of steps you can take to fix the problem if it dogs you though. They're somewhat tricky if you're not used to the command line of OS X, so be warned. Also, if this doesn't do the trick, the only thing I've found to fix the problem is a full reinstall, which is painful to say the least.
So, after getting all of the above "working" we've found some nasty things out. The first is that browsing servers from OS X is complete garbage whether you're doing it with AFP or SMB to a Windows, Linux, or even Apple machine. Apparently somewhere around the 10.3.3 update, something went bad with their networking systems. I'm sure you've seen it with large folders with a lot of data in them which take forever to load. The problem is due to Apple indexing the entire folder every time you open it.
There are other problems, such as file locks that don't drop once people are done with the file. This resulted in people not being able to copy, move or delete folders or files on the server--not a good thing obviously. We saw that a lot and had to go in to the Computer Management console and manually close out files that people supposedly had "open". I might add that this wasn't a problem at all with the Windows machine, nor the OS 9 machines that were working and continue to work great with the Windows file server. This is strictly an OS X problem.
So what's the solution? Luckily, there are two. They both cost a bit and the choice depends on how big a group you are. First there is DAVE from Thursby Software - www.thursby.com. What this does is properly implment the SMB protocol on OS X. When using it, you don't get the ._ files littered around your server and in addition to that, it's sooooo much faster than the Apple SMB system. How Apple took what was a great opensource system and did what they did to it should be criminal, but I digress. The only downside to DAVE is that it's about $100+ a system and you have to go and install it on each system. Additionally, if you're using a multi-user environment on the workstation (which you should be doing) then you have to do some extra funky steps to get it work. I'll try and post it here, but otherwise, the folks are Thursby can send you the workaround quite easily.
The second option is to purchase ExtremeZ-IP from Group Logic - www.grouplogic.com. This system runs on the server itself and it takes over the duties of serving files up via AFP so that the OS X machines can work with them in their bungled manor. You might be saying that this would point to there being a problem with the Windows implementation of AFP, but this is not the case as our OS 9 and even lone OS 8.6 machines could connect to the server without any problem all this time. Now, there may be problems with using OS 9 & OS X in the same environment, but that's so painful to think about, I'd rather repress it. This software does a very good job and fixes countless problems which you should read about on their site.
The drawbacks? It's expensive. It's not something for people with ten or less machines to get. It also works on a per client connection license base for its pricing structure. The way its set up is rather annoying, but I'm just thankful the software is around and as you guessed, this is the system we went with. It's been functioning just fine. There have been no open files left on the server and permissions aren't getting mangled like they were with the built-in AFP setup. It isn't as fast as an SMB connection with DAVE though. This is mainly only seen in browsing, but it's still a lot faster than the default system.
So there you have it. This is probably one of the biggest problems you'll run in to in your integration woes, so prepare for it early. You can get demos of both DAVE and ExtremeZ-IP which I highly recommend trying out before you buy. Who knows, maybe some service pack will come along that will fix all of this, but even if that's the case, there are still issues at the core of how Apple does business on the local network.
Now that we've been running the InCopy/InDesign Bridge setup at my office for awhile, it makes sense to address how it's working as well as mention a couple of items that have come up in the process of all of this. Ironically, it is goofy to do this when the whole CS 2 system is being released, but I doubt that many will be updating to this right away after just starting to get CS 1 under control.
So, overall things have been good. IC & ID work well together. We haven't missed a deadline yet and people are starting to get the hang of the system. Our San Francisco group is making better use of it however since they work on tighter deadlines and the ability to have multiple editors working on a file at the same time has greatly improved their lives. For our Walnut Creek group, the Bridge Workflow hasn't netted as much of a gain because they work on specialized projects and a monthly magazine that has a more fluid schedule.
The editors seem to understand InCopy fine, since it is after all a pretty simple program. The designers have gotten the hang of InDesign, but our most competent people still say they don't feel as fast as they did in Quark. I get the feeling this is just something in their heads because I see them fly around InDesign and do things faster than I ever saw them do in Quark. They're also forgetting that if InDesign does crash the auto-recovery feature is making for a lot less lost work.
Beyond a general sense of things working, we've seen a few problems crop up. The first one was lock files. These little buggers have a bad way of hanging around even after things have been checked back in. Since applying the latest 3.0.1 update (which I'll refer to as the 3.0.3 update, since their naming scheme is crap) it seems that a lot of these problems have gone away. The same is true for a weird problem of a file looking just fine in InDesign, but once it was opened in InCopy the text would flow in some crazy ways and even skip pages. This was definitely not good, but it seems to be definitely fixed by 3.0.3.
The two other big issues with IC/ID CS1 are no generational saving for IC & the amount of stories created for an article. The first problem really have no solution and it is basically this: when an editor wants to save at various points in editing and article so that they can go back to an older version if they need to, they can't. The Save & Save As functions are disable in IC when working on an .indd file. This has been a gripe for our editors and with good reason. Supposedly with IC CS 2 and Version Cue 2, you can save all the steps in a story that you're working on. I have yet to see this in action or see how well it works, but it sounds promising and it would give a solution to a problem that's been dogging us for a while.
In addition to this, the fact that when creating the editable stories from InDesign for InCopy, you get a huge amount of files in the process has been very annoying. The biggest burden comes in losing files and also that the editors lose track of what's what. We can usually keep it all together, but it's tough. I've heard that this is something which doesn't go away in CS 2, but it is somewhat easier to manage because there is this assignment system that takes care of everything now. Once again, I hope to test that out in the near future.
Separate from all of this, we've been installing Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 on a few machines and have found it to work fine. While it works with ExtremeZ-IP without problems, you can't used the Security Configuration Wizard to lock the server down or it causes some problems, or so Group Logic tells us. Also, if using Extensis Font Reserve Server watch out for the font caches. These corrupt often and can be cleared out by deleting /Users/JSmith/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache and you can also clear out the Font Cache in Font Reserve itself which will eliminate a lot of problems.
Here are a few things that will drive you nuts:
- For Entourage to import Outlook Express mail from OS 9, you need to have a machine with Classic or OS 9 on it, as well as Outlook Express in order to make the conversion, so make sure to have something capable of this when doing the conversion. Otherwise, for the most part, the conversion works great and all you have to re-enter is the mail account password.
- Watch out for your InDesign & InCopy filenames. This is part of the reason that we had to switch to SAMBA because AppleTalk can't see a file that is more than 30 characters long (this includes the file extension.) So, there is the first big problem of files not showing up when someone using AppleTalk tries to find them. There is also the problem of people working in InCopy because a lock file is created. That lock filename will toss in about eight extra characters in to the actual name of the file. When the user checks the file back in, InCopy will not be able to find the locked file and thus it won't get deleted IF the user is using AppleTalk. The net result will be a file that appears to be locked no matter who is looking at it and you have to manually that file from the server.
- Some of your users will be mystified as to why some of their files won't open and this is usually due to them leaving off file extensions. Obviously a foreign concept to most old school Mac users, it's something they're going to have to get used to. For a quick workaround, they can drag and drop the file on the application that should open it.
- The Little Blue Triangle. I have no idea why this isn't on by default, but when people start to try to save their files, they'll get very frustrated because they can't see anything in the file browsing menu. There is a little blue triangle at the top of that window that needs to be clicked. This one even got some of my very experienced users, so beware.
- Word can crash at inopportune moments. I have yet to figure this one out, but it only happens on machines that have Font Reserve installed and the only way to deal with it is to reboot the machine. Usually it occurs after a weekend where the machine has been left on. Having your users shut everything down on a Friday might alleviate some pain in this department as well as making sure that the Office Font Cache isn't corrupted.
In all truth and fairness, if you find a good system that you like to administrate, whether it is Mac, Windows, or even Linux for some applications, you're going to be set in this day and age. For my purposes, I went with Windows Server 2000 & 2003. For the most part this decision was based on familiarity, reliability, and cost effectiveness. Many people are already swearing by the Mac OS X Server platform, but as I've stated earlier, in testing it out, I just haven't found it to be quite "there" yet. We had already invested in a many thousand dollar file/backup server previous to the upgrade which ran Windows 2000, so there was no way to simply toss that out.
We upgraded our file server to Windows 2003 just for the sake of homogeneity and also because 2003 is not all that different from 2000. It's so much similar that it seems most Windows 2000 applications will run fine on 2003. Such was the case for the Font Reserve Server system. While it wasn't rated to run on Windows 2003 when we installed it, it ran just fine. The software is pretty easy to install, but the version we initially installed was 1.7 and the problems we had with it were inherent to that release, such as a memory leak that required the service to be restarted every day--not fun. There were also problems with the client for Font Reserve Server 1.7 in how it interacted with InDesign and other programs. For all practical purposes, install version 1.7.2 or greater. After installing that, a large degree of our problems disappeared and made our lives a lot better. Version 1.7.2 isn't the end-all be-all for the software though and new releases should be installed as soon as they can.
One important bit to note is that there is a lot of information about how to set up fonts on an OS X machine so that you won't run in to any problems when you go to press. Essentially, Apple decided to created these damned things called dfonts. They're fine just for working on the machine normally, but when it comes to press work, they're trash. When you set up Font Reserve you essentially need to let it overtake the systems where the client is running on. To do this, you need a User System Fonts folder in the Administration Workgroup. This is not adequately covered in the instructions very well, but make sure to do this if you want to make sure that dfonts don't find their way into your finished documents. When you start up a system that is running the Font Reserve Server client, it will come up with a message asking if you want to move the fonts. This requires Administrator rights on your system and it also requires that you let it happen. Once it moves all the fonts, the system will then be extremely reliant on your Font Reserve Server system, so if you want to do this to a laptop, you probably want to think twice. If a machine is not able to contact the Font Reserve Server, it will have a lot of font problems when viewing documents, surfing the internet, getting email, and just about any other basic function. The machine won't crash, but it also won't be very usable.
It may actually be easier to skip the entire User System Fonts process if you find that from the above information, you will net more pain than you gain. Just think about which course of action you want to take before you do it, since changing gears mid-production cycle is not going to make you a popular individual.
Oh yes, even though you can do it, don't even think about having people at another office location, tethered to yours via a T1 or what you try to access the Font Reserve Server for regular operation. It's maddening to say the least and it will slow them down greatly. Font Reserve Server is a very crucial part to a system once it's set up and any small blip in your network or Point-to-Point connection and you're going to have a very unhappy employee after what it does to their system.
For storage, we used our large, terabyte of storage server to act as our file server. OS X and Windows 2003 actually play quite nice with one another for file serving concerns. We have however run into a couple big problems. The first one was that even though we have gigabit Ethernet ports on all the workstations, servers, and switches in the office, we were running all the data for the file server through a single Ethernet port. We're not exactly sure how it started, but these huge slowdowns in data transmission started occurring for both OS X and older OS 9 machines. It may have been the port was failing or it may have been due to a problem with AppleTalk. We weren't sure which one was the cause for sure, but we had to fix it, since it would take about five minutes to transfer a megabyte of information.
Our solution consisted of installing more ports on the server. We now have four and they're all gigabit. That is the solution I'd recommend for most people out there trying to solve the problem in a hurry. The other option is to install a hotfix from Microsoft that directly deals with this issue. We never installed this hotfix since our multi-port solution has worked out fine, although there have been some occasions where it seems things are slowing down again and the hotfix may need to be installed, although I'm hoping it's a fix in Windows 2003 SP1. AppleTalk also causes some other problems with InDesign & InCopy, but I'll get in to those when discussing workstation setup.
Beyond the items I've listed to this point and things such as a Domain Controller, DHCP server, DNS server, the only other thing that has to be installed on a server if you need it is the Quark License Administrator. If for some reason, you need to run multiple copies of Quark 6.5 (the latest version as of this writing) then you'll want the QLA. We have a group that processes ads and a lot of them come in from people using Quark, so they need these files. No, the InDesign Quark 4.11 import function won't always work and people are using Quark 5, 6, and even 6.5 out there, so you may very well need this set up. The initial setup is decently easy, but there are a lot of steps and it gets redundant to do all of this. Luckily, once it is set up you don't need to mess with it again. So, if you need to set up QLA, just think of it as a reminder as to why you're switching over to InDesign. I just hope that Quark will send you the correct serial number.
When logged in as an administrator, set up a new user account. As I mentioned before, you might want to seriously consider locking down the applications that they can use. This is all up to your own feelings as to how your users interact with the system and how much they can be trusted not to monkey with things. Ideally, if you have VERY trustworthy users, then give them admin rights so that updates can automatically install without you having to worry about it.
As I personal preference, I like to fast user switching turned on, although that is not worth all it's cracked up to be, since you can't really do anything to the machine or the user accounts that are logged in when you use this mode. Also, once finished, you'll want to have the system automatically log in as the user you just created unless this is a machine that will have multiple people using it at any given point.
You now want to log out from your administrator account and then log back in as the new user. Some of the first things I do are: clean up the dock and remove any applications the user can't run or won't need, open up Word & Excel to uncheck the auto startup windows, go in to the AutoCorrect settings in Word and get rid of auto bold, hyperlink, ordinals, and anything else that code cause problems by generating characters that don't really exist in a normal font set. Beware of Smart Quotes, as most publishing houses will want to use them, even though they're not a valid font.
We set up server shares for all our users and docked them, saving their usernames and passwords in the process. This made things a lot easier, because in order to keep InDesign & InCopy happy we found that we had to force users to use the SAMBA system, thus accessing servers in this fashion smb://192.168.1.1 instead of the standard way in "Connect to Server" which is just the IP address. Make sure that your users don't browse for the servers. Doing this will have them user AppleTalk and it will route them to the server in a way that can be unpredictable and probably not the way you want them getting there. Also, if you're like us with multiple network ports on your file server, then you'll have to do the entry method for them so that they go over different ports. Without it, everyone will route through the same port and you could end up seeing the slow down that we saw.
Double check that Font Reserve is set up for that user, because it will often not set up the access settings needed for a user, even if you've done it as the Administrator. Also, make sure you go in to the Font Reserve Client application folder Cmd+click on Font Reserve Client and click on "Show Package Contents". Browse to Contents>Shared Support and open up the Font Reserve Settings application in there and check "Turn on when log in" and "Activate fonts immediately".
The last thing to do is to move over their files and mail. You shouldn't run into any problems here, as Entourage imports a lot of different formats and files that worked in OS 9 should work fine in OS X.