05-31-2008, 05:20 PM

I am creating an image for student laptops. I have installed the Xcode Interface Builder, and have been able to successfully remove the "Private Browsing" "Reset Safari" & "Empty Cache" option from the menu.

Now, I would like to remove the "Clear History" and "Show All History" options. However, the MainMenu.nib file does not show those options. I thought I might just remove the "History" menu all together, but taking that out of the menu causes Safari to crash.

The unit I am working on is a Leopard 10.5.3 Macbook.

05-31-2008, 07:09 PM

Hacking Safari is not a good idea. As you found out, it can cause stability problems. Your kludges are also likely to be overwritten in future security updates.

Use Parental Controls, that's what they're for.

06-01-2008, 03:09 PM

Parental controls are not an option. We manage our accounts via WGM and it is not an option to lock down histories in WGM. This is an image for 250+ macbooks that are deployed in a school district. We are in our 6th year of a 1:1 program. Hacking the menu has never been a problem, but the History thing was something I decided to finally tackle.

From what I have figured out, I don't think the MainMenu.nib is actually attached to "Show History" and "Clear History". The crash looks like it is directly related a script that tried to create those two menu items. I have dug through the package contents of Safari, I cannot find that script.

Worst case, I will instead have students use FireFox, which I was able to successfully lock down by instructions I have posted here.

06-01-2008, 03:53 PM

Originally Posted by jimohagan

We manage our accounts via WGM and it is not an option to lock down histories in WGM.

Well, you might have mentioned that in the first place....

Honestly, if you have access to a powerful tool like Workgroup Manager, there are a hundred simpler and more elegant ways to manage clients without resorting to hacking off bits of the operating system. Like, for example, running a script at login/logout to clear the history. And there's certainly nothing preventing you from using Parental Controls as well.

06-01-2008, 07:33 PM

Use of parental controls, as has been indicated to me, is for local user accounts, not WGM accounts. However, I have not delved into the nuances of Leopard server enough to know if they have a separate option for parental controls similar to the local option. At this point, our servers are 10.4 and do not support this granular option.

A login/logout script to clear histories is exactly NOT what I am indicating I need. What I need is a way to prevent the clearing of histories from WGM managed accounts. Having 250+ students create their individual accounts and then go back and manually set parental controls is not an option, and I am not sure that the local Parental Controls will allow that on a WGM account.

I will continue to dig into Safari, but the more I look, the more FireFox is a more admin friendly option as opposed to Safari for locking down WGM accounts.

06-01-2008, 07:41 PM

According to the Leopard Server User Management Manual:

Managing Parental Controls Preferences
Parental Controls preferences allow you to hide profanity in Dictionary, limit access to
websites, or set time limits or other contraints on computer usage. To manage Parental
Controls preferences, computers must have Mac OS X v10.5 or later.

No clearing of histories...

06-17-2008, 11:18 AM

I am in a similar situation as I work for a school district that is in the CFF program and am building an image for 2000 macbooks and am looking for a way to lock out the View menu in Safari. To ease your management issues wouldn't it be better to run and OD master and bind your systems then have all the students use a default student account and have them set there own password then you could make changes on the fly and it would hit all your systems the next time they were on the network just a thought I do this in my schools and works great.