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Uninstalling ARD Admin

Submitted by tlarkin on Thu, 10/23/2008 - 15:23
Hello, and welcome to another tech solution that I came up with ARD Admin.  Since at my work we have a very large Apple computer deployment of 6,000 Macbooks and probably another 1,500 to 2,000 Mac desktops, we use ARD Admin on a regular basis.  Probably every single day.  My co-workers and I have ran into a few problems with ARD Admin.  Mainly with it running sluggish or crashing then evolving from that into not running at all.  Then having to force quit the application itself all the time over and over again. Well, you can't just trash the ARD Admin application because it installs resources all over the place.  After a few emails and some google searching I came up with a complete catalog of what it installs and where, and then wrote this little script to wipe out all of it's components.  You can then reinstall the Application off the installer CD and it will work great.  I have only tested this with OS X 10.5.5 and ARD Admin 3.2.2.     
#!/bin/sh
IFS=$'\t\n'
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin
export PATH
 
home=~
list="	# Remote Desktop Application
	/Applications/Remote Desktop.app
 
	# ARD Agent Software
	/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement
	/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/RemoteDesktop.menu
 
	# Application Support Files
	/Library/Application Support/Apple/Remote Desktop
 
	# Preferences
	/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ARDAgent.plist
	/Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteDesktop.plist
	/Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteManagement.launchd
	/Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteManagement.plist
 
	# Receipts
	/Library/Receipts/RemoteDesktopAdmin320.pkg
	/Library/Receipts/RemoteDesktopAdmin322.pkg
	/Library/Receipts/RemoteDesktopClient.pkg
	/Library/Receipts/RemoteDesktopRMDB.pkg
 
	# User Items
	$home/Library/Application Support/Remote Desktop
	$home/Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteDesktop.plist
 
	# Reporting Database
	/var/db/RemoteManagement
"
 
for file in $list ; do
	if [[ -e $file ]]
	then rm -rf $file
	fi
done
exit 0
This should delete everything that gets installed from the installer.pkg that you run off the ARD Admin install CD.  Now you can freely reinstall ARD Admin clean. I had to update this, my syntax was off. I am teaching myself how to loop in scripting and it seems that even though my syntax in theory was correct, with loops it can get kind of weird. This is the updated version which should work just fine.  I must give credit to those at http://www.macosxhints.com for helping me out on my original bad syntax.
If you liked this, buy me a beer.

Comments

ARD Issues

Submitted by Steve (not verified) on Tue, 12/16/2008 - 16:55.

Something else that you might try in the future (this is funny, but I've found it to work quite well) is to logout of your machine as local admin. Login as root > make a copy of the plist and save it where ever > log back in as the original local admin user and delete the original plist > then take the copy and place it back in the Preferences folder and viola, everything is magically fixed. I've done this several times and I've also done the same or similar as you have listed here.