Bookmarks, Safari, and Apple Remote Desktop

Question

Level 1

70 points

Bookmarks, Safari, and Apple Remote Desktop

I'm managing two labs and 178 MBP laptops in an elementary school, and was wondering if there was a way to add bookmarks to the computers using ARD (I'm using Safari as browser... and other than sending a document and adding to each individual machine, then manually adding the bookmark). Can it be done using ARD?

MacBook Pro 2.8, iMac Core Duo 2.0, Mac OS X (10.6), 1 eMac 1.25 Mhz, 5th Gen iPods, iPhone 3G

Posted on Jan 30, 2010 8:47 AM

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Answer 1

aaronbu

Level 1

40 points

Jan 5, 2011 11:49 AM in response to KJM1

Safari saves its bookmarks per user in ~/Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist

It would be very easy to just replace that plist with one containing all of the bookmarks you want to push. However this would remove all of the existing bookmarks. You can use the defaults tool to write new bookmarks into the plist without destroying the users existing bookmarks.

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Answer 2

KJM1 Author

Level 1

70 points

Jan 5, 2011 11:49 AM in response to aaronbu

Thanks,
I thought of this after the fact. I'm creating a master bookmarks list and sending it out so they all have the majority of the teacher requested bookmarks.

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Answer 3

Jan 5, 2011 11:49 AM in response to KJM1

Any help on doing a similar thing while using Firefox? I want to push out bookmarks and a bookmark menu, but cannot find the correct file to push.

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Answer 4

varjak paw

Level 10

170,206 points

Jan 5, 2011 11:49 AM in response to JenniferH

Firefox makes it more difficult because it creates user profiles using a randomly-assigned number, so unless you imaged all the systems for a common disk image and so have the same user profile ID number, it's much harder to find and set the path to the bookmarks file. Here's the path to the Firefox bookmarks:

userhome -> Application Support -> Firefox -> Profiles -> {randomID}.default -> bookmarks.html

If you look at this on a couple of different systems, you'll see the difference in the folder name in Profiles. I don't know how you'd get around this so that you could push the bookmarks file out to multiple computers with a single command.

Regards.

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