10-02-2009, 09:25 AM

I am the only tech person in a private high school and I have just deployed 100 macbooks to some of our students. I left on most of the iLife applications because we want them to play around with the new technology, however, these are still our laptops and one of our rules is no inappropriate music.

Unfortunately, we have already found some pretty bad music on a few of the laptops. Is there a way to retrieve a list of the itunes music on their machine, or even just a list of all mp3's found on the hard drive, through a script or unix? I have apple remote desktop installed on all the computers and can run a task to all of them which will hopefully hit them when they turn on their computer next.

Pretty much I'm looking for anything that helps me not have to go to each computer one by one. Thanks a ton in advance!

10-02-2009, 09:33 AM

The best way of doing it would be to set parental controls in itunes in my opinion. Truthfully, this really wont stop them. They are kids, and they want to listen to what they like (appropriate or otherwise). Even if you disable them from downloading explicit music from itunes there is always youtube, pandora, etc..

So in my honest opinion you are fighting a losing battle, and if you try to combat it you will be waste your time and resources.

Sorry to be so blunt, but i thought id help a little

10-02-2009, 11:08 AM

I appreciate your honesty and trust me I have already thought about that. I am fully aware that there will always be workarounds. If my iTunes was disabled, I would just use another program and keep mp3's. Heck the only reason I got into tech was because of fighting restrictions! But!, we also have to do our best to keep things appropriate for the sake of our parents and teachers. Of course they are going to listen to what they want to as we all did.

It is not my intention to get into an arms race with the students but I do need to do something - broken windows theory comes to mind. Our plan is to disable itunes for 4 weeks for any student that is breaking the acceptable use contract. Also they are standard accounts which means they cannot install any other application without an administrator. This should have the desired effect.

Unfortunately, I am still at the point where I will have to go to each one individually which I am not looking forward to. ...Any ideas???...

Oh and thanks for the response!!

10-02-2009, 11:09 AM

Issues of appropriate music notwithstanding, for the size of the deployment you are managing, you may want to look at the Apple Remote Desktop application.

Apple - Remote Desktop 3

This app is excellent for remote management across a network of machines and allows you to control the machines remotely, generate reports, run scripts, open applications etc.

10-02-2009, 11:16 AM

ok I'm an idiot. I am using ARD and I didn't see anything I could use in reports....then I saw the drop down at the top. It was set to System Overview and I didn't realize it was a drop down.

I will give this a try asap.

Thanks for the help. Very impressed with the response time in this forum.