Recently, I had a discussion with an IT team, struggling with managing over 100 desktops.  Currently, they don’t use any centralized directory for authentication and access.  While it surprised me, they had some reasons why.

In the discussion, I recommended moving in this direction.  One of their hurdles is that they manage a multi-platform desktop environment.  I decided to look at two different scenarios, and do some preliminary tests:

• Connecting Mac and Windows clients to an OS X Open Directory
• Connecting Mac and Winows clients to a Windows 2008 Active Directory

My focus was on cross-platform management, Windows to Open Directory, or OS X to Active Directory. After a brief amount of research, it became clear that the first scenario is not an option right now, as Apple’s Domain setup doesn’t support Windows 7 clients.  The second scenario, however, does support both platforms.  There are a few minor issues to be aware of.

Here is the basic setup process I went through for connecting OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) clients to Active Directory (Windows 2008 R2):

Go to System/Library/CoreServices, and click Directory Utility:

Enter your domain name (forest name is the same in this instance), and create a Computer ID (call it what you want).  Click on the “Create mobile account at login”.  This basically caches Active Directory credentials locally, so if the user takes their machine somewhere outside of the network, they can still login.

Click “Administrative”, and enter a preferred domain server.  This is not necessary, because it can search for domain controllers at login, but this improves speed.  You can also decide which Active Directory users or groups can have admin access on the machine.

Click “Bind” (These image show “unbind” because I already did it).  It will ask for domain admin credentials, which I entered, and this machine became part of Active Directory.  From this point on, any Active Directory user can login to this machine (No need to create local accounts).

From here, I decided to go one step further, and auto-mount the user home folder from the server.  This can be done for any network share.

I created an automator application, that runs a shell script that looks like this:

It pulls the $USER information from the system, and is whichever user is logged in, in this case Shannon. I named the Automator application “Mount!”, and stored it in my documents folder.

I added this to my login through the login options section of Accounts (although, if you want to do it for all users, there is another place we would put this application).

Now, whenever this user logs into this machine, using the Active Directory account, it auto mounts the network folder as well.

Some things that are important to note:

• When setting up the AD Binding, choose create mobile account at login.  This basically caches permissions, and creates a local home folder, allowing machine logins when not on the AD network.
• While I run my networks DNS i provided at the gateway, I forward all DNS requests about this internal domain to the domain controller.  I did this due to the unique DNS setup Windows does for it’s AD domain.  For me, this solved issues related to the “Network Account Server” showing unavailable in the login Preference Pane.

Recently, a friend of mine who has experienced the staining and iSight issues decided to upgrade to the new Unibody MacBook.  After helping her move data from the old to the new,  got the “opportunity” to figure out how to solve some issues.

First,  I had to solve the stained wrist wrest problem.   I have previously used the Mr Clean Magic Eraser to clean MacBook’s, but this time it only had average success.   I then found an article that said nail polish remover was an alternative cleaner.   I tried it, and it seemed to help more.  After both cleaners, the wrist rest is still slightly stained, but i’ll keep working on a fix for it.

Second, and more annoyingly, the built-in iSight wasn’t working.   I did all the usual things like reset the PRAM, and the PMU/SMC.  Nothing worked, and I noticed that the device didn’t even show up in System Info.  More digging led me to some folks who pulled out the LCD screen, and found that the iSight camera cable was slightly unseated.  That seemed like my last best hope, so I went and grabbed some tools.

I found a decent set of instructions for doing the screen removal at ScreenTek Inc. The bevel removal seemed to be the trickiest part. There are no screws, just plastic clips, which translates to “easy to break”.  Fortunately, the removal went ok, and all the clips were still intact afterwards.

I got the screen apart, and sure enough, the iSight cable was slightly out of place.  Slightly, in this case, means less than a centimeter, seriously.

I pushed it back in place, and launched Photo Booth to test.  I saw the green light come on, and then saw video. It worked!

I put the LCD back in place, and screwed it back in (17 screws).  After snapping the bezel back on, all was well.  The OCD in me had to immediately clean the screen, because there were some slight finger prints.  Now, I am back in business with iChat and PhotoBooth goodness.

Oh wait, I just realized how messed up the trackpad button really is.  I’ll leave that repair for another day.

The change of the battery made upgrading a hard drive slightly more difficult, as there is no panel that opens to do that anymore.  The solution now is to remove the whole bottom casing.  There are 10 screws involved, and 3 of the back screws are longer than the others.  It is important to keep track of where the screws go.

Once removed, you have access to everything, including the battery with a sticker saying Do Not Remove.

On the lower left, you see the hard drive, positioned in the same place as the original Unibody MacBook.

There is a small black bracketbetween the hard drive and the DVD drive with two screws.  Remove those screws, and pull out the bracket.  Once removed, the hard drive is free.  Remove the SATA connector from the drive and pull the drive out.  There are 4 screws on the hard drive that need to be removed and installed on your replacement drive.  They require the T6 Hex screwdriver, found at your local geek supply, such as The Shack.  Once you have moved those little screws to the new drive, connect the SATA cable and position the new drive.  Put the black bracket back in place, and secure.  Do the same for the bottom casing, and you are done!

Of course, now you have a Mac with a blank drive which isn’t terribly useful.  Turn on your Mac, pop in the OS X install DVD, and hold down the Option key until it gives you the option of booting from that DVD.  Install the Operating System, and then off you go.

Enjoy the new hard drive.

Mac’s have not always been the most friendly machines to perform such upgrades on.  Powerbooks were notorious for the thousand plus screws necessary to make any sort of upgrade.  There have been some exceptions where Apple made hard drive installs not so bad, such as some older iMacs and the latest generation of Macbooks.

I recently decided to upgrade the hard drive in my Aluminum 24″ iMac.  I assumed it would be relatively straightforward, much like the ram install was.  I was wrong.  I had to remove the glass, remove the aluminum top, remove the LCD screen, and work  underneath it to reach the hard drive.  Good times.

In the end, the upgrade went fairly smooth.  I did run into a couple problem areas, that I made some notes on.

I followed the instructions made available at Amfiteatar.

Some things to be aware of:

• The magnetic pads around the aluminum rim that hold the glass in place are a bit poorly designed.  I had one fall off because it’s sticky adhesive was no longer useful.  I had to improvise.
• Be very careful handling and storing the glass top.  Nobody wants to break it, but equally important is not getting ANY lint or smudges behind the glass.  If you do, you end up noticing after the reassemble, and you’ll have to remove the glass again.
• Be equally aware of how you handle the LCD screen.  Similar to the glass, it easily attracts dust and finger smudges.

Follow those instructions, and you’ll have a faster and bigger hard drive in no time.

There are many useful and fun applications in the App Store.  There are also many pointless apps that seem to catch public attention.  While the list of available applications is long, there are two apps I am still waiting for.  First, I am hopeful that Adium will release a chat client for the iPhone.  Word on the street was that they would release one, but it seems apparent that was just a rumor for the time being.  Second, I have wanted a way to remotely monitor my Mac server.  This is easily the most important machine in my home network, and it provides many useful functions.

iStat widgets and menus have long been available for the Mac, and are a very popular suite of apps for many Mac users I know.  The fact that they are free makes them an even better deal.  If you like them, please donate.  The one weakness is that these programs are focused on local monitoring, and don’t have a mechanism for remote monitoring.   This is fine for seeing how the workstation you are currently using is consuming resources, but ineffective for monitoring a Mac server.

Word of them developing an application that ran on the iPhone and connected remotely to the Mac of your choice was great to hear.  This new app has been developed as part of the iStat team’s new focus on iPhone apps through the company Bjango.

iStat for iPhone, in conjunction with iStat Server (free) running on a Mac, provides remote viewing of that machine’s current resource utilization, operating temperatures, network information, and fan operations.  

You can run the Server component on as many Macs as you like. They each get paired with the iPhone individually, and securely.  The setup requires that you open a TCP port through your firewall (5109), which allows the two-way communication.  An added benefit of the Application is that it will give you the similar resource information about your iPhone, as well as, an option to free up memory.  

So far, this is my favorite application purchased from the App Store.

All that for $1.99, or $2.99 if you don’t get to it soon.

Handbrake is a wonderful, open-source, utility for converting DVD movies to other formats.  In my case, I use it to convert my DVD collection for use on my Apple TV.  It works great.

Today, a new version (0.93) was released.  It includes a long list of improvements from GUI updates to fixes for the lingering errors in 0.92.  Among the list of changes was the news that Handbrake will no longer decrypt DVDs!  This is no shock to Windows users, who are accustomed to using more than one application to rip a movie. For the rest of us, this is quite the change.  I have never needed anything other than Handbrake.

Fortunately, it is an easily fixable issue, and the Handbrake developers include the solution.  Simply install the VLC player.  Handbrake will automatically leverage the necessary library to do the decryption, if needed.

What makes this news interesting to me is the “why” associated with this change.  What was wrong with the built-in solution?  Was it fear of some legal pressure?  Is it based on a collaboration of those two teams?  Is it assumed that the VLC team will continue to develop and manage the necessary library(ies) needed to keep this solution working?  Is it possible that VLC is working to have Blu Ray decryption soon that Handbrake would now be able to leverage? In my dreams.

The possibilities are both exciting, and slightly disconcerting, as this is a relatively important change for Handbrake users.

The more prominent change in their release, while not as interesting to me, was the addition of converting files and sources, other than DVD’s.  This is similar in capability to the now open-sourced project VisualHub.

When I bought my first iPhone, and read the many reviews online, there was the occasional murmur from geeks wishing for a tethering solution for their iPhone.  

Tethering is the process of linking your phone to your computer, and using the phones data connection on your laptop.

While i thought it would be kind of cool, I didn’t really care.  The first gen iPhone is EDGE only.  We all know that EDGE means SLOW.  It’s fine for most iPhone tasks like checking email, getting RSS feeds, and mobile-formatted sites.  Otherwise, it is slightly painful to use.  That’s really not a good tethering solution.

Fast forward to today, we have the iPhone 3G now.  If you are one of the lucky folks who have 3G in your area, tethering becomes a much more plausible thing.  The problem is, AT&T still doesn’t have a solution for us iPhone users.

This past week I read an article about a new application in the iTunes App Store.  It’s called NetShare – and it let’s you tether your iPhone.  As soon as I saw that, I immediately opened the App Store and tried to download it.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t!  It was gone.  The article was less than an hour old, and the app was no longer around.  Not sure what the deal was, I just gave up for the moment.  That evening, I was browsing the App Store, and decided to look for it again.  This time it was available, so I grabbed it.

Tonight, I finally had the opportunity to setup it up.  The instructions are very straightforward, but if you need a visual queue, here is a link to a user on the Mac Rumors forum who snapped some screenshots.

Unfortunately, where I live, there is only EDGE.  So the speed of it was pretty dismal (as expected) on my Macbook Air:

The important thing for this test though, is that it actually works, which is all I wanted to know.  The cool thing will come tomorrow, when I go to work.  I work in a city with 3G, and I can’t wait to try it.  I’ll upload a speed test after I get a chance tomorrow.

Unfortunately for most folks, even those in 3G areas, the app is once again not available for the moment.  Not sure what is going on with the store, but hopefully it comes back for the masses.

Update 08/04/2008: 

I brought my laptop to work early today so I could test this out.  I was very surprised and pleased at the speed difference:

One thing of note.  The connection seems slightly unreliable.  I sometimes have to retry page loads, etc, to make it work.

Like most iPhone owners this weekend, I was having a blast with the new 2.0 software.  Also as a .Mac user, I have watched the painful Mobile Me transition unfold (well, it still is).  While waiting for the Mobile Me rollercoaster to stop, I spent a lot of time experimenting with or reading about many of the 500 applications now available for iPhone and iPod Touch users.  Interestingly, I noticed one important application not on the list.

While AIM showed up for opening day to provide its users with a chat program, everyone else was absent.  More importantly, no third party developer had a multi-protocol chat client available!  I was very surprised that an iPhone equivalent of Adium or Pidgin wasn’t available.  Of the 500 applications available, I still find myself crawling back to Meebo, to accomplish something I should have a program for.

Oh multi-protocol IM client developers, where art thou?  Please make an app available.  I would happily pay for such a solution.

The day apple released the iPhone, and in the process, provided only minimal support for its own .Mac service – I was perplexed.  What the heck were they thinking?  Every other Apple solution allowed for total syncing of Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Bookmarks, and more.  Why didn’t the iPhone?  In the age of ActiveSync, Blackberry Enterprise, and other solutions offering full sync of at least email, contacts, and calendars it makes no sense.  The iPhone seemed a perfect match for .Mac services, and therefore a point of discontent as a .Mac user.  (I immediately took the opportunity to provide feedback to Apple.)

To me, this was the one big screw up of the iPhone.  The phone is great otherwise.  Why would they not make better integration?

This week’s announcement of “Mobile Me” finally provides an answer. It just happens to be a bit late - a common theme for .Mac.  It seems as though they finally got the details figured out on making all this push and sync stuff working with their own services; something that should have been done long ago.  When Steve Jobs commented during his keynote that they finally “got it right” with .Mac, it seems that even he recognized the blunder.

The question for Apple will now be, is this enough to draw more people to .Mac Mobile Me? I think there is potential, but it may be a hard sell job.  The ability to keep all your messaging and collaboration data in sync on any of your Apple devices (and even Windows now) is huge in my book.  I no longer have to plug my phone into my Mac to sync that stuff.   To finally have a more complete web-based solution to go with it, definitely a plus.  The 20GB of data storage seems a bit meager on the surface.  However, in the context of how iDisk works (local syncing to your desktop), I can see why larger storage could potentially be a nightmare to keep under control.  I still think they could offer at least 40GB, and sweeten the deal.  After all, they are asking $100 a year.

The web hosting is fine, and good that they have already allowed for personal domain names.  However, this piece still seems incomplete.  Why not include DNS hosting for that domain?  Why not let users have email accounts at their personal domain?  I hope that they work on this part of the package.

All in all, Mobile Me looks like it will be a welcome change, and big step forward.  I hope they continue improving it after launch.

I thought to myself, “I wonder what this little laptop can do?”.  This laptop is my wife’s Macbook from work.  It is a 2ghz Core 2 Duo, with 2GB of ram.  Nice little machine.

I decided to put it to the test.  I opened a finder window to the Applications folder, selected all, and chose “Open”.  There were many applications in subfolders, so it opened finder windows of those.  I had to go through them one by one, and open the applications inside.  Suprisingly, it didn’t take that long.  More suprising was that nothing crashed.  On top of that, one of the first apps to open, iDVD, had some theme video and music going in the background the whole time.

Once everything launched, and I responded to the various startup windows, like from Microsoft Office, I used expose to show all the various windows.  Here is that screenshot:

The “96″ count came from the number of running items in the dock.  There are a lot more windows than that open (due to the various finder windows, etc.).  In the end, it worked fine.  Was there lag? Yep.  Would I use my machine this way? Of course not. Was it “usable”? Yes, but not with the performance I prefer. Was it interesting to see? Yep.  Is it feasible for someone to run 150 applications on a MBP with 4gb of ram?  I would say so, but to claim no performance hit would be a lie.  They would also need to have 150 different applications installed, which I obviously topped out at 96.