SpamSieve in a netboot environment

In the institute I administer, most all of our machines are netbooted. I have some users that have chosen to purchase SpamSieve, a decision that I whole heartedly support. The problem is, it is not possible to install SS in the “Applications Folder” of the netboot image. Is there any better solution to having Mail find SS in another location other than to put it in startup items? Thank you for an absolutely spectacular product!

As long as the OS can find SpamSieve, it doesn’t matter where you put it. Normally, everything works fine. The reason I recommend putting SpamSieve in the /Applications folder is that the Mail plug-in will be able to find it there even if the OS’s Launch Services database is messed up.

What path would you like to install SpamSieve at? Perhaps I can add that as an alternate search location.

Well, in a netbooted machine, the local disk (with a machine with only one internal disk) gets mounted at the ungainly location

/private/var/netboot

so that the “local Applications folder” would be found at

/private/var/netboot/Applications

OK, so you’re referring to the Applications folder in the Network domain, right? That’s where I intend to make sure the plug-in looks. The actual “ungainly” path doesn’t really matter.

I have thought a bit more about this as I drove home tonight. The Applications folder I mentioned above assumes that a local version of the OS has been installed on the local disk. But it’s quite possible that a machine has been netbooted “diskless” when the computer has no local disk at all. But regardless of a given computer and how it was booted, the user has to have a home directory. The home directory may be on a local disk or on a network server, but it’s got to be somewhere that the user has access to. The directory where you keep the corpos et al is in the user’s Library/Application Support. Would that be an acceptable alternate location? There’s never ambiguity where the user’s Application Support directory is.

If you’re going to put it in the home directory, I recommend ~/Applications/SpamSieve.app. This is unambiguous, and the SpamSieve plug-in already knows to look there.

Sounds find to me. As the old adage says, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Thanks for wonderful tech support!