Last updated at 2021-01-14 12:04:26 by ouit0354

Administrator Accounts on your Mac

The vast majority of tasks can be carried out on your Orchard Mac without administrator privileges, and you should never log into your Mac as anything other than a standard user. However, depending on how it is managed, there may be up to three different administrator accounts on your Orchard Mac, detailed below.

Local Administrator (ladmin)

The Local Administrator (ladmin) account may be present if:

  • You are a laptop user
  • You have specifically requested it

This account is to be used solely for elevating your privileges when asked to by the operating system, e.g. when unlocking a pane in System Preferences, and you should be aware of its password. The below example shows how to unlock the Network preference pane if you have a ladmin account. This might be necessary if you use a laptop on a network external to Oxford and need to make some changes guided by their IT staff.

Locked System Preferences pane Providing admin credentials

You should not use the ladmin account to:

  • Install software. Check that the software is not already available in the Orchard Software Centre or App Store, then contact your local IT support.

  • Log in to your computer
  • Delete any system tools
  • Give another account admin privileges
  • Delete or remove admin privileges from another admin account

If you have a ladmin account but do not know the password or never asked for it to be present, or if you think you need a ladmin account, please contact IT support.

Site Administrator (sadmin)

If your IT support is done locally rather than by EDMS in IT Services, you will see this account. It allows your local IT support staff to carry out maintenance on your computer when you report a problem.

Orchard Administrator (orchard)

This is the overarching admin account on your computer which allows the Orchard systems to manage, perform updates and collect inventory. A member of the Orchard team may, if necessary, use this to connect to your machine to diagnose faults or solve issues. We will only use this account to login after we have been granted permission to do so. In general the orchard account is there to allow management tasks to happen unattended.


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