• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  MobileMe,  Time Machine

    Mac in the Cloud

    August 20, 2008

    A few days ago I noticed a post in Tim O’Reilly’s twitter feed asking whether or not it would matter whether people ran a Mac or a PC once everyone had migrated to a cloud.  Well, there are a few things about Mac OS X that make it fairly difficult to run in a cloud environment: EFI – Mac OS X doesn’t use a BIOS like most Operating Systems.  This makes the bootup process fairly difficult in a distributed computing environment where the Guest OS would be OS X and the Host OS would be something else. Lack of Firepower – I love the Xserve.  I always have.  They’re some…

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  • VMware

    DockSync for Parallels

    August 19, 2008

    With VMware you can use the vmrun command to launch commands in Windows from your Mac.  However, there is no option to do this in Parallels and so VerySimple Dev blog has a Windows app called DockSync which works with a Parallels shared folder.  DockSync monitors Parallels shared folders for files ending with .task extensions. The .task files contain Windows command line actions. You can script a command via Applescript or Terminal that will output a .task file to the shared folder. The .task file will be picked up by DockSync and executed at the Windows command line.

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  • MobileMe

    MobileMe and Downtime

    August 19, 2008

    Today I got the following email: We have already made many improvements to MobileMe, but we still have many more to make. To recognize our users’ patience, we are giving every MobileMe subscriber as of today a free 60 day extension. This is in addition to the one month extension most subscribers have already received. We are working very hard to make MobileMe a great service we can all be proud of. We know that MobileMe’s launch has not been our finest hour, and we truly appreciate your patience as we turn this around. Read this article for more details. The MobileMe Team Now, I realize that the transition to MobileMe…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Time Machine

    Mac OS X 10.5: Time Machine Config

    August 18, 2008

    You can customize what Time Machine does not back up by using the following plist: /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist Simply add the strings that you don’t want to back up and it will no longer back up those locations.  Remove the strings to re-add them at a later date. In the UserPathsExcluded key, you can exclude paths that in relation to users home directories.

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Network Printing

    Mac OS X Server 10.5: com.apple.mcxprinting

    August 17, 2008

    So if you set the RequireAdminToAddPrinters to false in the com.apple.mcxprinting MCX then you would expect that it then allow non-admin users to actually add printers to their computers.  Well, you (and I) would be wrong. Which leaves me pondering exactly what this string does… But that’s digressing. How would you actually make it where you can have a user self-install their own printers? Luckily Joel Rennich knew… Open the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf file. Locate the line: # All administration operations require an administrator to authenticate… Change the following lines to: Limit CUPS-Add-Modify-Printer CUPS-Delete-Printer CUPS-Add-Modify-Class CUPS-Delete-Class CUPS-Set-Default; # AuthType Default # Require user @SYSTEM Require valid-user Order deny,allow /Limit; Some notes: Non-admins…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  VMware

    Mac OS X: VMware Beta 2

    August 16, 2008

    VMware Fusion beta 2 is now available for download.  Why would you want to download it?  Well, if you’re into running VMs of Mac OS X Server then this is really a great product.  You can setup Mac OS X Server as a guest OS in VMware Fusion beta 2.   For those looking to obtain access to specific Windows applications, VMware Beta 2 also supports the new Unity 2.0 feature that allows you to run a Windows application like you would run any Mac application.  This means you can open Windows applications without running them inside the VMware window , put them in the dock, minimize each one on its…

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