Mac OS X @ University of Oslo - in numbers

University of Oslo (UiO) has been a "Mac-site" (not mac-only!) since about 1986. In the late 1990s, the number of Macintoshes at UiO peaked at more than 2000. To day the number of Macintoshes are much fewer, but in spite of this, the Macintosh community seems reasonably robust. In the later years one can see a noticeable interest in Macintosh-solutions. And, let it be said, had Apple not switched to Mac OS X with its UNIX foundation, the Macintosh at UiO would to day most certainly have been dead and buried.

Mac OS X at UiO from September 2002 – June 2006

Center for Information Technology Services (USIT) is responsible for designing and managing the Maintenance Routines (MR) keeping the online machines up-to-date with updates and patches. These routines are logged and gives a reasonably accurate number of machines included in the MR.

We aim at logging only the active machines, and machines which have not been successfully pinged during ninety days, shall as a rule, be removed from the MR. This has up to this day been done more or less manually, when someone takes the time to do it.

Above is a summary of the last four years deployment of MOSX at UiO. Due to the somewhat occasional removing of the not-pinging machines mentioned above, the numbers might not be 100% correct. However, the error is hardly big.

The machines included in the graph above are stationary, permanent placed at the users office. Portable Macintoshes which are used both at the office and at home, are also included in the log. Portable machines using wireless connections (used by staff or students) are not included. The spread of Macintoshes among students is not logged. However, our general impression is that the Mac is quite a popular computer among students.

System versions and updates

Due to the MR, the UiO-Macs are reasonably up-to-date with system versions and patches. The routines does not automatically update from Panther to Tiger. This must be done manually by the user at a time which is suitable. The successive updates or security updates are done automatically after a few days if the user has not already done it by way of Software Update. As of July 2006 the system-status of the UiO-Macs is:

Less than one percent of the logged machines are not using MOSX 10.3.9 or 10.4.6 or 10.4.7.

OSX-daily – the Management Routine.

Some people might wonder why we have such a big part of Macs using Mac OS X 10.3.9 Panther. The reasons are twofold :

10.3.9 Panther has been very stable for us. 10.4 Tiger did not feel robust before 10.4.3 and later. Many users did not see sufficient advantages by moving to Tiger.
In the last half of 2005, USIT started developing a new version of the MR. This new version is called OSX-daily and is better suited for managing portable machines, in something the old routines did not excel.
Since 10.4.6 Tiger was a condition for the new MR, we did not push too hard for updating to Tiger before most of the MR was usable, if not finished. In the fall of 2006 we will probably see a steady migration to Tiger.

Readers who would like to know more about OSX-daily, can take a look at these URLs in English. The first is the user-instruction for deploying OSX-daily, the second is some background-information about OSX-daily.

Redaksjon: Steinar Moum, macadm@usit.uio.no
Dokument opprettet: 04.04.2003, endret: 05.07.2006


Om UiO Studier Studentliv Forskning For ansatte Oppslagstavla Bibliotek

IT-TJENESTER