Category: Apple

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Sun Ray 5 Early Access part 2

I finally got time again to start playing with Sun Ray 5 Early Access software. Now my current setup probably should not be used for any type of test more than simple single/dual user testing. But I did not want to test the software on the current working server. So I decided to install it in a VMWare image on my Mac Pro. The Mac Pro is more than suited to handle it and had plenty of free memory/processor/storage to use so there was no contention (I gave the VM 4 processors and 8 gig of ram)..

The kicker was getting VMWare Fusion to actually allocate the network cards the way I needed them. I gave the VM 2 nics (the Mac Pro has 2), however the only options that VMWare Fusion let you do is NAT, Host-Only, and Bridged. None of which will work if I want a private network for the Sun Ray’s. To fix this you will need to go and edit some files that VMWare Fusion uses. What I had to do was the following:

1. Open up the Terminal app
2. Edit the file /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh 

sudo vi /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh

3. Comment out the following line:

"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 ''

And then add 2 lines directly below that line, which tells vmware to bind the en0 physical device to the vmnet0 virtual device, same for en1 to vmnet2. Note you can not use vmnet1 or vmnet8 as those are for NAT and Host-only connections.

"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet0.pid vmnet0 en0
"$LIBDIR/vmnet-bridge" -d /var/run/vmnet-bridge-vmnet2.pid vmnet2 en1

Once done, do the following:

sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Fusion/boot.sh --restart

Now go in to your Mac System Preferences and configure the second network card for a private subnet (i.e. 192.168.128.0/24, and set the IP to be something like 192.168.128.254).

Now make sure that your VM is NOT started and is in a powered off state. Go in to the VM and under the settings for that VM add another network adapter, make sure it is selected as “Connected” it doesn’t matter what the device is configured to as we will change it later to an option that is not shown in that list.

Now you need to change the .VMX file so that it can use the new network device. So go in to the directory where you have your VM’s at and then cd in to the machine.vmwarevm directory (For example mine is called SolarisDev.vmwarevm)

Once in there you will need to edit the vmx file, mine is called SolarisDev.vmx. The first thing we are going to change is the ethernet0.connectionType property. Right now it could be any of the ones listed (host-only,bridged, nat). But we are going to change this to “custom”:

ethernet0.connectionType="custom"

Next find the entry for ethernet0.vnet, if it doesn’t exist create it and make it look like the line below. If it does exist and doesn’t match that below, make it match that:

ethernet0.vnet = "vmnet0"

Now we need to do the same for the ethernet1 entries. The only difference to what is above is vmnet0 changes to vmnet2. Once the changes are made you can save the file and start up your Solaris VM. Now what ever network is on your en0 connection on your Mac should be what is connected to the e1000g0 network on the Solaris side. I used the e1000g0 as the “public” side of the Sun Ray server. The e1000g1 interface will be what ever is connected on the en1 connection on the Mac side. I used this adapter for the private Sun Ray Lan.

You should be able to finish following the instructions on the Sun Ray wiki now and get everything configured.

To test the soft client, I set up LAN Connections on the Sun Ray Server:

/opt/SUNWut/sbin/utadm -L on

I then installed the soft client in another VM on the same machine that only had access to the public network. You then can tell the soft client what the IP of the Sun Ray server is and it will connect. Pretty darn cool that the soft client works with minimal config.

This can probably be done on a MacBook Pro as well, if you use the wireless connection as the public side and the wired as the private side. Nice way to do a little demo in one computer.

For reference here is what my network section of the .vmx file looks like :

ethernet0.addressType = "generated"
ethernet0.connectionType = "custom"
ethernet0.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:f8:29:3b"
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = "0"
ethernet0.linkStatePropagation.enable = "TRUE"
ethernet0.pciSlotNumber = "32"
ethernet0.present = "TRUE"
ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000"
ethernet0.vnet = "vmnet0"
ethernet0.wakeOnPcktRcv = "FALSE"
ethernet1.addressType = "generated"
ethernet1.connectionType = "custom"
ethernet1.generatedAddress = "00:0c:29:f8:29:45"
ethernet1.generatedAddressOffset = "10"
ethernet1.linkStatePropagation.enable = "TRUE"
ethernet1.pciSlotNumber = "35"
ethernet1.present = "TRUE"
ethernet1.virtualDev = "e1000"
ethernet1.vnet = "vmnet2"
ethernet1.wakeOnPcktRcv = "FALSE"

References:
Sun Ray Software 4.2 Wiki: http://wikis.sun.com/display/SRSS4dot2/Home

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The PC Tax

After reading this PDF about the Apple Tax, I  find it interesting that they do not include anything about the PC Tax…..

So here is my take on the stuff that is missing:

1. OS Upgrades for a multiple PC house vs a multiple MAC House. Most households probably have more than one PC/Mac in the house now days. So when a new OS comes out, how much does it take to “upgrade” the house.. Looking at the current price of Microsoft Vista Home Premimum, it is $115.99 for the Upgrade edition. MacOSX Leopard is currently $129.00. So for one computer, yes MacOS is a little more expensive, but lets look at if you have 4 computers in the house. To upgrade your 4 PC’s to Vista, you are going to pay $463.96. If you have 4 Mac’s, to upgrade them to MacOS X Leopard, $199.00.. Yes that is correct it costs you $264.96 more to upgrade 4 PC’s than it does to upgrade 4 Mac’s. This is because Apple offers a “family pack” pricing, which allows you to install the software on up to 5 Mac’s in the same household. Microsoft does not do this.

2. Office Software. If all you need is basic Word processing and spread sheet’s, iWork from Apple does everything you would need. Once again a single upgrade would cost $79, and they offer a family pack too, for $99 you can upgrade 5 Mac’s. Now look at Microsoft Office Home and Student it is $94.45 per computer. So for 4 PC’s, we are up to $377.80 now vs the $99 for iWork on the Mac. Difference of $278.80.

3. Virus protection. For the most part (read as 99%) Mac’s are free of Virus’. So there is no “software” needed on them. But on PC’s you better not even connect it to the Interwebs with out having a virus protection software on the machine. So If we look at the sort of “defacto” Norton Antivirus, it costs $39.99 a YEAR per PC. So for our 4 PC’s it would be $159.96 a YEAR, whereas our Mac is $0.

If we add all this up as if Vista and Office just came out, our cost for upgrading a house of 4 PC’s would be $1,001.72.. Versus if we were to upgrade a house of 4 Mac’s to the newest MacOSX and iWork, it would cost $298.00. For a difference of $703.72. So a having a house of Mac’s is about 70% cheaper to upgrade than a house of PC’s is.

One section of the article is just plain wrong:

Finally, there is a category of costs that could be called opportunity costs, options that are simply not
available in the Apple world.  These options include cutting edge technologies that buyers really want
including HDMI (for connecting a PC to a TV for viewing high-definition content), the aforementioned
Blu-Ray, eSATA (for fast access to external storage), media card readers (for interoperation with other
digital devices like cameras), built-in 3G wireless (to stay connected anywhere cell service is live),
fingerprint readers (to easily access secure data), and TV Tuners (to watch and record broadcast
content).  These technologies, revolutionary now, will one day be standard on all systems.  Too bad if
a Mac buyer has any interest in them.

Has the person never heard of USB media card readers? They are UNIVERSAL… I have a couple of them, work great with the Mac. I also have an Elgato USB TV Tuner that does HDTV, clear QAM and allows my Mac to record shows. There is no reason  you couldn’t put a Blu-Ray reader in a Mac Pro, or even get a USB enclosure for it. Just because some PC’s come with all this stuff built in, unless you are going to user it, does it really matter if it is there. Heck I have a new printer that has one of the Media Card readers in it, so when it is connected via USB to the Mac it looks like any other removable media device.

The final part of the article that sort of is ridiculous, is the author assumes that to do wireless on a Mac you need an Airport Extreme. Sorry to burst your bubble, but there is a reason it is called 802.11[abng] it is a standard that EVERYONE uses. You don’t need to have a specific brand unless you really want to be brand loyal or don’t know any better. I have a $40 Linksys wireless router that works 100% fine with the Mac’s I use. He also talks about the $100 cost for the family pack of the iLife software. I have 3 versions of this, and it is worth the money. Microsoft has NO comparable software offering for that price with the functionality that iLife provides. Even if they did, they would not be selling 5 licenses for $100. It would probably be $50 to $80 per license.

The other issue that he brings up is that most software that works on Windows XP will work on Vista, but people who switch from PC to Mac will have to buy all new software. This is not entirly true. You can use Windows XP/Vista on Mac Hardware either via BootCamp or VMWare Fusion/Parallels Desktop. I do this for a couple of applications that I need that are only available on Windows. But for the most part I have found that everything I need for my day to day computing on the Mac is free software. There are only a couple of programs I have bought because I needed functionality that the provided.. But for the most part there are equivalent Mac programs for every Windows one, and most of the time they are better and some times Free.

I think the next time before some one tries to say how much more Mac’s cost they need to really do their home work. Yes the hardware costs more up front, but in the long run, it last longer, runs better and has less problems. I used to have a Dual G4 for a desktop. It used dual 533Mhz processors and ran MacOSX Tiger just fine. Try running Vista on a Pentium III and we will talk.. Windows is getting better about the bloat, but they still have a LONG way to go.

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memory in mac pro

What a difference more memory makes in the mac pro…….

Before:

before

After:

after

Pretty darn snappy now, and vmware does not page as much when doing things in “windows”

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AIX Most secure OS? Think not.

IBM’s Xforce published their new 2008 annual report. In it they had this chart:
xforce2008

Surprising is that IBM put’s one of their own OS’s near the bottom of the list. Some of my opinions are :

1. No one uses AIX that much, so no one looks for holes in the code.
2. Any one who uses AIX, doesn’t have it directly connected to the Internet.
3. It is so cost prohibitive to use, that people are looking at Solaris/Linux or Windows to run their business on.

But the funniest thing about this is the last I used AIX the following were still done on install by IBM:
1. telnet enabled
2. root logins allowed remotely
3. no ssh comes with the OS, you have to install a crappy “linux toolkit”, and then install another 10 different packages to get SSH enabled.
4. No RBAC
5. Syslog configuration does not exist
6. Root does not even have a password on install

Seems to me that IBM needs to fix some fundamental issues with their OWN OS before they can say it is not one of the “Most Vulnerable Operating Systems”.

The funniest issue with this is for MacOSX to be listed at the top, all most all of those require some one to actually run something on the machine with administrative privileges.

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Best Buy suckering people

I went to Best Buy today to walk around and get out of the house. While I was there I walked past their little Mac section of the store. There was a man there looking and playing with a MacBook Pro. A Best Buy person came over and asked him if he needed any help. So the man proceeded to ask the Best Buy person how he would transfer his files from his PC to the Mac if he bought it. What I heard next just made me mad… She told him that in order to transfer the files to the new Mac he would need some expensive software or he could bring the PC in to Best Buy and they would transfer all his files over for a charge. Why is it stores like this try to get any amount of money they can out of people who are computer un-savy?

People it is really easy to move stuff between PC and Mac. Apple even has a small 2:30 minute video on how to do it.. Don’t let the Big Box stores charge you for something that is easy and any one can do it.