In this lesson, we're going to talk about Max System preferences, specifically the ones that you'll
use as a Macintosh system administrator.
I'm not going to go into great detail on most of the system preferences, but only highlight the key
things that you'll use, interact with every single day as a sysadmin.
I do recommend that you spend some time exploring all the system preferences to really get an understanding
of how the Mac operating system works and the changes that you can make that affect both the user environment
and the system as a whole.
To get started, we're going to access the system preferences from underneath the Apple menu to the
Apple menu system preferences.
And this will open up and we'll have all of the system preferences available to us.
Now, the first system preference that we're going to explore is the energy saver.
And there's just a couple of things in here I want to mention now, your screen may look different than
mine, depending on whether you have a Mac that runs on battery or is just plugs into the wall.
But if you do have a laptop with a battery in it, you'll see options for battery and power adapter.
And you'll want to make sure that you make the setting changes in both of these tabs to work universally
depending on how it's being powered.
But just a few of the main things I want to point out, power nap, probably a good idea, as well as
awake for wi fi network access or wait for network access or LAN network access.
If you've got the the machine plugged into a network connection, that will that will allow you to take
on lan if you need to wake up the computer remotely and do any work with it.
The other thing I want to point out is the schedule.
This can be kind of handy as well, particularly if you're in an environment like a computer lab where
you want the machines to basically reboot and have a clean experience the next day for your users,
you can schedule a restart or a shutdown every day or various days of the week at certain times.
So that can be extremely useful.
Let's say you want to reboot all the Macs at your organization every Saturday at midnight, for example,
so that every week people come in on Monday, they've got a fresh experience.
Next one is Startup Desk.
We've used startup dust before and we've talked about that this is where you can select various different
drives to boot up your Mac.
So we've done this in the pre boot recovery tools environment here.
You can also do it directly in the operating system.
So if you have multiple partitions with multiple operating systems or you want to boot off of removable
media, you can go in and do that.
Some of these system preferences require you to enter your password to be able to make changes.
This is one of those.
So I can do that here and type in my password and, you know, make that adjustment.
And then once you've made your change, if you want to restart immediately, you can hit restart.
Otherwise, when you close the system, preferences will remember this option, the one that's highlighted.
So we'll go ahead and close out of that.
The next one is software update.
And this is a relatively new system preference.
In one of the more recent Mac OS updates, it will automatically check and show whether you're running
the latest Mac OS, which I am.
You have the option here to turn on automatically keep my Mac up to date.
But you also have some more advanced options.
And as a system administrator, there may be some updates that you want to download and install and
there may be others that you do not.
So I highly recommend you get familiar with things under the advance button and just verify that you
want all of these updates to happen and you want them all done.
So you can see we've got system data files and security updates, which might be good, but you may
not want to move your users or the systems themselves automatically install the next version of Mac
OS until you've had a chance to maybe tested it in your environment and make sure that it's ready for
all users to update.
And you likely would want to control those updates yourself anyway.
But here's where you have your options to set this and said OK, to that and just keep the defaults.
Next up, we have the sharing system preference, the sharing system preferences, where you name your
computer, you've got both a friendly name here as well as a name that your computer can be found on
the network.
We'll talk more about the naming convention and the way that your Mac.
It has three different names in a future Lessa.
Further down, we've got our various different sharing options, so I'm just going to go through each
of these screen sharing will allow others to remotely control this computer.
So you want to make sure and I will say on all of these, you have the option of who to allow access
for.
I highly recommend that any of these that you may check the box to turn on here, that you very carefully
choose what users have access to do this either to local or on the network.
Next up is file sharing.
This is where you can turn file sharing on and add different file share so that other computers on the
network, access to your computer and the files that you choose to share with them.
This also allows you to set your different permissions for those shares for sharing is just like file
sharing.
It allows you to share a local printer.
So maybe I have a USB printer connected to my Mac and I want to provide that printer to others out on
the network.
I can configure that here.
Remote logging is set up other users to use agents to access your Mac.
So this is probably going to be used most often if you're doing things in SSA Shell.
So we'll talk about this a little bit more in the class a little bit later on.
But this is where you would go in and turn that on.
Remote management uses Apple remote desktop for remote desktop is a tool that Apple provides to manage
a number of Macs, and this is where you would go in and configure that and then also choose which users
can do what things in Apple remote desktop.
We'll talk about more about this and how to configure your clients when we do the Apple remote desktop
lesson later on in the course.
Remote Apple events will allow you to write Apple scripts and execute them on this computer from other
computers.
Internet sharing allows you to share out your Internet connection, kind of like turning your your Mac
into a wireless access point, you can share out your wired network connection or Wi-Fi, for example,
or you can use USB or other things to share your connection.
Bluetooth sharing is file sharing that allows you to share files back and forth with other devices over
Bluetooth and then finally contact caching is brand new.
And basically what this is, this allows you to cash Mac OS updates and other downloads from the App
Store or from Apple on your computer and make them available peer to peer over your local area network.
So instead of having it say you have one hundred Macs and they only do the latest Mac OS update, instead
of all of them going out and downloading it over the Internet directly from Apple, the first machine,
which could be this machine that has the content caching enabled.
It would download the update from Apple, it would install it and it would cache a copy of that installer
on this machine and then provide it to the other machines on the network, thereby copying it faster
from peer to peer rather than having all of them downloaded again from the Internet.
Also, without having to saturate your Internet bandwidth on updates so you can turn this on and then
you have options of where you want those.
The cash to remain by default puts it on the boot volume on your normal Macintosh hard drive.
But if you'd rather have a separate drive just for caching, you can set that up.
Next, we have the network system preference network system preference shows you your available network
connections, and this is where you can select different wi fi connections here.
You can also turn wi fi on and off.
Perhaps you've got a network connection where you've got Ethernet connection and Wi-Fi and you want
to turn wi fi off and force connectivity over Ethernet.
This is where you could do that.
You can also create new connections here, one of which is a VPN connection.
I think it's pretty handy that Apple has a Cisco VPN built into the operating system.
There's also competing protocols as well.
A lot of that.
Let's go to the advanced button here and see various other things, for example, preferred or save
wireless networks.
You can see your I.P. address information, you can renew your leases here.
You can view and add custom DNS settings and search domains.
You can also see a hardware Mac address.
One thing I will note on the Wi-Fi tab here is that if you do have a network where you've cached a password,
let's say it's eight to 11 password that you've connected to a corporate network and you need to basically
change your password.
And it's trying to connect to that network with the old password, thereby not allowing you to connect
any longer.
You can use this wi fi tab to find that connection.
Select it.
And delete it, thereby removing that cache password and allowing you to connect to that network again
and enter in the new password, so that will come up sometimes for your users, especially if you're
using peep or sleep or any other kind of encrypted or certificate based wi fi connection.
Next up is security and privacy.
So I'm only going to touch on a couple of things in here.
This is another one of those system preferences where you have to enter your password to interact.
But I do want to point out a couple of things.
First of all, let's talk about file vault file, vault tab.
So file vault is actually the encrypting technology that Apple has for encrypting your hard drive.
And you can see minds turn on the option to turn it off.
Since my drive was set up with apps, it's turned on by default.
If you're using HFS Plus and you want to have encryption on your hard drive, this is where you go in
and turn this on.
It will take a few minutes to activate and then it'll reboot your computer and begin encrypting.
Going back to the general tab, the other thing I want to talk about is gatekeeper, which is this little
section down here allow apps downloaded from the App Store and App Store and identified developers.
So you have those options here.
Older versions of Mac OS also had one where you could turn this off completely.
That's not an option any longer.
However, when you go to open an application, you do have the ability to right click on it.
And if it's not signed, you can right click on the app and you can say open.
And when you do it from this option here, if it is something that will not open, it will ask you to
override the gatekeeper setting and it'll launch the app.
So you may see something like that with an application.
The other thing that's not shown here, but will appear from time to time is Colonel Extension's Colonel
Extension's get installed with various applications and you have to go in and actually enable that colonel
extension to run.
And you'll see that in this space provided underneath, allow apps downloaded from.
So that's another added layer of security.
It just requires the user first at one time go in and allow for that.
And I'll remember that setting and allow that kernel extension to execute.
Examples probably would be avid pro tools that uses kernel extensions to communicate with OP or audio
interfaces.
I've seen it with various semantic products for endpoint protection.
Antivirus and things like that really depends on the application.
But you will see a prompt about that from the application and this is where you'll go in to modify that
and allow that to occur.
Next up is accessability.
Apple has actually won several awards for how they've integrated accessibility and special needs features
directly into the operating system.
And I'm not going to go through all these, but I do want you to be aware of them, especially if you've
got users in your environment that could take advantage of any of these features.
Voiceover Zoom sticky keys, display changes, invert inverting colors, reducing motion.
I mean, really runs the gamut of options here.
Malleson trackpad support, switch controls.
So many good things in here.
You should probably spend some time going through this and just trying out different ones to see what
they do, how they work and what kind of application they may have for you and some of your users.
And last but not least, we've got the users and group system preference, this is where you can add
local users or local groups to your Mac and change different login options and login items.
So I'm going to go ahead and authenticate so I can make some changes here.
I'm just going to cover a few things.
First, I'll start with my current user.
So one of the things you can do, change your password here.
Obviously, you can also go to login items.
This is basically if you're used to windows where you can put things in your startup folder, they'll
automatically execute upon logging in.
That's what login items does as well.
So you can hit the plus here and add other applications or you can drag and drop applications inside
this window to add them and they will automatically launch for you when you first log in.
Next up is gas user, so I have gas user turned off by default, you can turn that on.
Now, I want to point out here that because I'm using five volt, if I enable the guest user, the only
thing they can do on the machine is Access Safari.
Now, this may be very helpful if you want to have just a Macintosh kiosk out there that can really
only run safari, you can you can actually use the guest user to allow for that.
There's also other features of guest users.
For example, when you log out, it basically deletes anything that was in the guest user's home directory.
So any files they may have saved or anything else.
Another good feature, if you're using this in a shared computing environment where you want to keep
files secure and not have a bunch of junk from previous users laying around in the home directory or
on the desktop.
Lodging options allow for some different things for the lodging window, as well as joining a network
account server, you can turn automatic log in on or off.
Right now I have it off and I'm the only user that's logged in.
I can display my log in a window whether I want to have a list of users or if I just want username and
password feels for fields for added security.
You can choose to enable or disable the sleep, shut down and restart buttons.
You're going to have an input menu, let's say, like, you know, maybe instead of a keyboard and in
a kiosk mode, maybe you'll want a keyboard overlay that they can enter.
Whether or not you want to show password hints and then whether or not you want to allow fast user switching.
Fast user switching is very handy in that you can add this end up in the top right hand corner of your
screen.
You can switch between multiple users that are logged in at the same time.
This can be helpful if you want to say log in as a system administrator without logging out one of your
current users.
Accessibility options are also integrated into the login window.
So if you've got users that would use any of these accessibility features, you actually have those
turned on before the user logs into the system.
And then finally, network account server, this is where you can join an old app or active directory
by entering in the directory information for your active directory domain, and you can authenticate
here and we'll get into that part a little bit later in the course.
But this is where you basically join your Mac to a domain or an open directory or an old app server
for directory and login info instead of using the local user accounts that are specified here.
The last thing I'll show is if I right.
Click on a current user.
I have the option for advanced options.
I'm not going to make any modifications here.
And certainly they warn you that you may damage the user account if you change these.
But this is give you a little bit more background here.
Some of the things you can adjust my account name as my account name, but I can change the full name
here.
I can change my default group.
I can also change my home directory location.
And there's some of these other settings in here as well.
Log in Shell and things like that for the side.
So I'm not going to make any changes here.
I'm in hit cancel.
But that's one that a lot of folks don't know about.
And there are some applications for wanting to use those those settings and make those adjustments.