Need to disable Fast User Switching on multiple machines

Question

Hi,
I have several labs with Fast User Switching turned on. I recently found out that it is incompatible with network home folders so I need a way to disable it on all of the lab machines. But from what I have seen the settings are part of ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist which means each user has their own setting for displaying the FUS menu item. Is there an easy way to shut it off system wide? Should I remove the USER.menu from /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras ?
If you have a suggestion in the form of a script, or something ARD can do, that would be best.
Please advise!
iMac Core Duos (56) & PowerMac G4s (75)   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

Answer 1

The first thing to try is this defaults command:
<pre>defaults write /Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences MultipleSessionEnabled -bool 'NO'</pre>
That should disable it system-wide, but the menu extra may remain. If so, you'll need to run a script (as root) on every machine. (see below) This script requires you to have a program called "PlistBuddy". This program is not installed by default, but it can be found in many Apple-provided packages. To find which packages have it, do "locate PlistBuddy" in a terminal. Then open the original package (or download it), and copy PlistBuddy into , say, /usr/bin.
<pre>
cd /Users
for u in *; do
rm -f /tmp/tmp-menus
if [ -d "$u" ];
uiplist="/Users/$u/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist"
cp -p $uiplist ${uiplist}.bak
PlistBuddy -c "Print menuExtras" $uiplist | grep -v User.menu > /tmp/tmp-menus
PlistBuddy -c "Delete menuExtras" $uiplist
PlistBuddy -c "Import menuExtras /tmp/tmp-menus" $uiplist
fi
done
</pre>
Usual disclaimer: I haven't tested the above script extensively, make backups, don't complain if it erases your hard drive, etc...
G5 Tower   Mac OS X (10.4.2)