A few unusual computer questions

pior

Hi all!
I am currently rethinking my whole home setup and i have some questions. I know pretty much where I want to go with it, but I lack some software references.

SO I decided to remove everything web/communication related from the main machine, in order to prevent cluttering over the years and also to avoid distractions! To do so I just got one of these tiny 13inch Mac laptops to make it my web/aim/skype/virusfree(!) machine. I also want to use it to gather and display reference material.

First question. All my reference material is currently stored on a USB portable drive that I can load up anywere. Contains everything from tutorials, to inspirational art and real life picture references. Is there a way (on OSX) to synchronize that whole drive with something say, on the desktop. Scenario : Im somewhere outside, browsing stuff and see a great image I would love to save posted on polycount. I save it locally. When I go back home and eventually plug the USB drive in, I would like that file to be automatically copied over to the inspirational art folder located on the portable drive, with no action required from me. Is there a cool free program allowing this? (I use AllWaySync on Win so I an equivalent of that would be nice).

Also, second question, you know how in cybercafes and computer stores, they often have very fresh installs of the OSes, but still they let users do whatever they ant with the machines on display because no matter what, when the computer is restarted at night or at anytime, everything is wiped clean and restored to a very clean fresh install state. Well I would like to know how to do just that, on OSX. With a free app preferebly. I think TimeCapsule can do that, but it seems to require and external drive to operate. On the contrary - what I want is that OS state image to be stored inside the system, for the reboots+restores to be really transparent.

This one restore on startup thing, I also want to do it on the workstation PC in order to always have a fresh environment to use (all i need : max8 mudbox2009, Photoshop, SAI). So if you have any hints, fire away!!

Thanks!!

Mark Dygert

I was chatting with one of our programmers yesterday and he was telling me about his setup. He has a Mac Mini as a media center, and it hooks into a HP media server. The media sever backs up every machine connected to it as well as stores ghost images and all of the actual media. The HP server also has a feature to allow your iphone and ipod access to the server anywhere it can connect to the net. No cable, sync from anywhere. All of that was out of the box. Mac front end, HP server as a dumping ground doing the grunt work.

He talked about a blog post where a guy did pretty much the exact same thing and it can be used as a how-to guide, it might have some useful info in it, I'll pester him for a link. But it sounds like you need a bunch of server side scripts that won't be part of any out of the box option?

HP MediaSmart Home Server: Best part is how small it is.
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ReviewHPMediaSmartWindowsHomeServer.aspx

Mac Mini Home Theater Forums:
http://www.123macmini.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=64&sid=0514cbd64b32a0d8be4d46da96efdd33

moose

i did some stuff with that formatting to a default state in College pior, but i cant remember the specifics, and we did it on OS 7 through 9, not 10. We did however have a network image running (i think), and the system would apply the image when it was rebooted. I'm pretty sure it'd require some sort of network image, wether it was on your USB drive, or laptop.

I guess you could also make a startup image disc, and have it run everytime the system shuts down? I'm not too too tech saavy, just spittin ideas off the top of my head

would it really be necessary to wipe the machine though? You could hide the local directories and only map the drives where you can access them elsewhere. Seems like adding any software that you could potentially want to use more later would be a pain in the neck.

pior

Hey thanks for the input guys, definitely some things to look into.
As for adding new programs - I was hoping that since the computer would be fresh all the time (thanks to the reboot thing), adding new apps would be just a matter of adding a rather small amount of data to the main image. Something like, 'commit current computer state to startup image'.

I was also thinking of relying more on sandboxes to try out new software. I know it sounds a bit paranoid, but when I check the install/remove programs list on my desktop machine it always amazes me to see the amount of little apps floating there for no apparent reason. Yet since I don't know what they do I usually leave them in, and end up (I think) with tons of useless reg entries, processes running in the background and so on. I keep having parasite apps coming back behind my back (apple updater, bonjour service, google updater), it drives me nuts! That what I want to avoid basoically.

Microneezia

Where I used to work in IT, we had a bunch of public use computers. We had these type of OS installs (for PC mind you) but all the different applications were called "kiosk" software or had kiosk in the name somewhere. Even across different distributors.

I dont know much about applications for MAC but i suggest searching "Kiosk" OS for MAC. I did a quick search and it seems that it would lead you in the right direction.

hope it helps