When importing the preferences from ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/.plist, choose “Manage imported preferences: Always”. Then use Workgroup Manager to import the preference as in the aforementioned article from Apple. I’ll be filing a bug on that…įirst, set the appropriate preference manually:ĭefaults -currentHost write askForPassword -int 1 It appears that the preferences from the manifest imported via ManagedClient.app do not work as intended. So in effect, I had done precisely the opposite of what I had intended: I had enforced the screensaver to be turned off by default and prevented users from turning it on. How embarrassing: not only was the screensaver not being enforced - the checkbox in the Security preferences pane was greyed out and unavailable. I was happy and confident: I was now managing this the “Apple-supported way”, instead of relying on elaborate hackery.Īnd then a company vice-president asked why the screensaver wasn’t being enforced on his new MacBook Air and why he couldn’t turn it on.Ī little investigation, and he was right. So I set this up, did some minimal testing on my personal laptop, and rolled it out. The manifest leads you to try something like this: In Workgroup Manager, in the Preferences management Details view, if you add /System/Library/CoreServices/ManagedClient.app, you import a bunch of useful preference manifests. With Leopard, Apple added a Preferences Manifest for the screensaver. Later, I moved to a script that ran at login that used defaults -currentHost write to set the desired preferences at each log in.įor Tiger, Apple documented a way to enforce the screensaver via MCX (Managed Client): you can read the article here. I developed one for 10.1 that I also used for 10.2 and 10.3. There have been plenty of hacks to do so. You’d think something as simple and basic as enforcing a screensaver would be easy. Enforcing a screensaver for security reasons has given me a lot of headaches over the years.