Thomas-M

Q: How are changes to Profile Manager groups applied?

Making changes to group(s) in Profile Manager, up on saving the changes. How are these applied to machines?

Do i have to remove the old profile and install a new profile on each of the machines?

Mac mini (Late 2012), OS X Server

Posted on Apr 23, 2016 6:37 AM

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Q: How are changes to Profile Manager groups applied?

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  • by cdhw,

    cdhw cdhw Apr 23, 2016 11:46 AM in response to Thomas-M
    Level 4 (2,668 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Apr 23, 2016 11:46 AM in response to Thomas-M

    When you make the changes the revisions should cause PM to create and push the necessary new profiles and remove the previous ones. You can get an idea of what's going on by reviewing the 'Active Tasks' and the 'Completed Tasks'.

     

    Depending on what the changes are and the state of the client at the time the tasks may not complete until the current user has logged out and/or the machine has been rebooted - it's a bit of a black art really...

     

    C.

  • by Bosco1983,

    Bosco1983 Bosco1983 Apr 25, 2016 6:36 AM in response to Thomas-M
    Level 1 (61 points)
    Servers Enterprise
    Apr 25, 2016 6:36 AM in response to Thomas-M

    I belive that if your settings are set to "push", then any changes you make get "pushed" out to the devices when you click "Save".  If set to "manual" then you click "push" when you want to do so.

     

    iPad profiles seem fairly straight forward, but machine level profiles (iMacs, Macbooks etc) have a bit more to them like CDHW said. 

     

    This is how I understand it, but please correct if I am wrong.

     

    Lets say you have a handful of computers and users.  You create a MACHINE level profile which sets the login window and network drive mounts, You then create a USER level profile to set a dock and user specific network mounts. 

     

    Each machine would get the MACHINE level profile pushed out to it, and settings saved in /Library/Managed Preferences

    When a USER logs in to a machine, they get their user level settings pulled down and saved on the computer also (/Library/managed preferences /USERNAME)

     

    So if you change a user level profile for a user who has logged in to 30 different computers, they will pull down the new settings for each of these machines when they login.  The local cache of the profile is handy as it makes future login times quicker, and offers some resilience if the servers are throwing a wobbler.

     

    The problem I find is that if a user's library needs wiping for some reason, Profile Manager doesn't recognise that the profile has been removed from the user and will not push a fresh one out unless you refresh the entire top level user groups settings.

     

    Hope that waffle helps a bit.