We are in the process of switching to OS X in our district for all of our Mac users. Currently, we have a number of OS X machines in our student computer labs. They are set up to automatically log in to a local user account on startup. The user account is a restricted account, but even with a restricted account, the user can change a few things, like the magnification and size of the dock. While this may not seem like a big deal, it is potentially annoying to the next user.

To protect the dock, you can simply lock the plist file that the dock settings are stored in. If you do that, any changes that are made to the dock are erased the next time the computer is restarted or the next time the user is logged out and then logged in again.

The plist file for the dock is located in the preferences folder in the library folder for the user. The name of the file is com.apple.dock.plist. Locate the file, do a get info on the file and check the “Locked” box.