That leaves item 1. Unix rdist can handle some of this work, but not all. The problem with using RevRdist is that RR would have to run as root, probably from root's crontab file. But RevRdist is a GUI program and there are difficulties starting a GUI program from the command line when some other user is logged in. Further, because RR is running as root, nasty users could misuse its Save As command to clobber any file on the client.
Comments are welcome.
To make things worse, the Computing Center at Purdue has been Borg'ed and will no longer buy or upgrade Mac lab hardware or software. This will make it difficult for me to test any new RevRdist or replacement under realistic conditions. There needs to be the creation of a taskforce to evaluate OS X following its March release to test it and to report on it. Set-up a few machines with OS X in the labs alongside the existing OS 9.x machines. See how how the OS X servers can be configured to deal with the authentication issues of open access.