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My company introduced a new travel policy, that even though it allows working while traveling outside the country, the manager needs to be informed each time. As a person who travels almost every month, I would like to avoid as I feel my manager is a bit prejudiced towards people that work while traveling.
So, what would be the best solution to faking the access location om my corporates MacBook Pro? We use GlobalProtect as our VPN client and Duoon the phone for 2FA.
I don't think I can install a secondary VPN client on my corporate laptop, as that might create some issues with the work VPN, plus it might get flagged Duo scanner that's installed in it.
I was thinking of creating a VPN hotspot through my personal laptop and then connect my work laptop and cellphone to it. Is there any other solution I can use?
If I go with the hotspot, should I use any particular software to make the connection faster or just the built-in Windows functionality should be enough?
Basically what I want to do is write iOS code on Xcode from my Windows PC which is connected to my Macbookpro. I tried a lot of applications for this and most of them connect through the internet and have screen action delays. Some of the other applications have a problem with sending mac commands from my windows keyboard.
So:
- Fast LAN connection
- Ability to pass mac shortcuts
- Responsive
- Hopefully free
- Hopefully copy paste data between computers
to state the obvious,so we are on the same page. the LAN is your Local Area Network, and the parameters of your LAN are defined by the Coverage area of your Modem's Wifi Range and the amount of Ethernet Hard Wire Connections, if you are trying to connect to a Mac on your LAN From a Windows Machine on the same LAN, That is not referred to as REMOTE CONNECTION, That is referred to as LOCAL NETWORKING, Connecting Remotely, or Remote Connection is when you connect From a Remote LAN or one that is not Your Personal LAN, and you use that LAN to Connect to a Computer on your LAN, that's remote connection, Hence, your connecting remotely, so.. Are you using Your LAN to achieve this and your having lag issues, or a you trying to do it remotely, if your trying to Remote Connect and your having trouble with Software, because i know it can be a pain, You should have mentioned what you have already tried, But.. Windows Remote Desktop Connection is buggy, i wouldn't recommend it, the way to go use to be TeamViewer as a free solution, then they Stopped the Free thing and started charging, Other Options were CrossLoop, it's good, but sometimes slow, Try if you haven't already, Most of the Good option are Paid, i rate Bomgar to be the highest, because your accessing Remotely via way of a Remote Box that is not technically inside the parameters of your LAN, hence more secure. LogMeIn is a good one
but as far as free is concerned, and to get the results you want, there is not much out there, obviously the idea is that they want you to buy the full versions, i'll do some research for you, but.. is it possible for you to provide a list of what you have already experimented with thus far, so i don't double handle. thanks
What do you recommend for quickly creating images for testing a software product (that needs hardware access - full USB port access)? Does virtualization cover this? I need to be able to quickly re-image the system to test from scratch again, and need good options for Windows and Mac OS.
Virtualization may work for you as long as it is only USB access.
VirtualBox is available with USB support either for "private use or evaluation" or commercially and works on Win, Mac and Linux. USB support on Linux and Mac is somewhat sporadical though and does not work with all devices. VBox supports snapshots.
VMWare has one free product called VMWare Server for Win and Linux but I'm not sure how far USB support is included in their server products. For Mac there is VMWare Fusion but that's not available for free. Fusion should work with most USB devices. Workstation products for Windows are more expensive. I think there is a trial version for all of them. All do snapshots.
I don't know how far Parallels (Mac) supports USB devices or snapshots.
You don't need snapshot functionality if you can afford some short downtime between re-imaging. You can shut down the VM and then just copy the disk image (which is nothing else but one or multiple regular files) and start the VM again. Snapshots can be reverted to a lot faster (without rebooting).
If virtual machines will work for you, you can choose between Virtual PC, VMWare and VirtualBox.
Virtual PC supports Win host and Win/linux guests. Although there are some caveats with regards to the X resolution support.
VMWare supports Win, OS X and Linux host. It supports Win and Linux guests.
VirtualBox supports same hosts and guests as VMWare.
None of the three supports OS X as guest officially. The reason is that OS X is licensed only for Apple machines. However, there are some hacks that allow installing OS X under VMWare. It might be also possible to install it under VirtualBox or Virtual PC, although I have not seen specific instructions.
If virtualization is not good enough for you, you can use precreated installation images or a disk imaging program.
For precreated installation images for Windows, you can use the sysprep tool (search for sysprep or system preparation tool). I don't know if there are equivalent tools for OS X from Apple.
For disk imaging programs, I know quite a lot people swear by Symantec Ghost. I personally have not used it, so can't give you much info about it. There's also a list of disk imaging programs on Wikipedia, so you evaluate these as well.
Hope that helps.
If virtualization is right for you depends on how much access direct access you actually need.
But if virtualization works then vmware offers products for Windows and Mac that support a Snapshot feature.
Or there's also VirtualBox which works on Linux, Windows and Mac, also supports snapshots and is free.
I use VMWare Player for this sort of stuff. I've not tested it with the sort of access you discuss (since I mostly do apps rather than driver-level stuff) but the advantages are many, specifically being able to copy the VM when it's shut down for later restore to a specific point (sort of a poor man's snapshot) and being able to have lots of configurations without blowing the hardware budget.
It certainly provides USB virtualization and I would say it's the best bet for providing the full device access. I would suggest testing it since, if it provides the hardware support you need, it's a very good solution for the other reasons given. The only other (non-VM) suggestion I can think of which would match it would be hard disk image backups which can be restored at will.
I've used Virtual PC heavily for this kind of thing in Windows, without ever hitting any issues. It's free, which is always a bonus ;o)
Edit: Just re-read the question - not sure that it has USB support. Should tick all the other boxes though
CloneZilla is a great, free way to reimage machines.
Once I worked for some company where we needed to test our software for various combinations of versions of OS, SPs and some other libraries which our application was dependent on. For each separate identified combination we had a separate partition image created with the help of Norton Ghost (DOS version). All images were put to a server. Whenever a tester got the next version of the system core to test, they would just methodically restore from all applicable images, install the application, test it and report it.
This approach though a straightforward one would allow full access to the hardware and will provide you with 100% native installation.
Nowadays, I still use this approach for my private PC. I'm sure you can try the latest achievements like Hyper-V. We use it nowadays where I work. When we tried to install Team Foundation Server (the process is far from being easy) we also had to drop the process at some point and just restore a virtual machine from an image because we realized we made a few mistakes during installation. Conceptually the same approach that saves a great deal of time. I'm not really sure though how compatible a virtual PC is in the sense of hardware access.
You can try both approaches.
P.S. Today there are two Ghost products, Symantec Ghost (good old one) for corporate use and Norton Ghost for home use (bloatware in my opinion). If you decide to try this option, I would recommend the Symantec Ghost (part of Ghost Solution Suite).
If you can't just use a virtual machine and take snapshots of the fresh install then do a fresh install onto real hardware and use a disk imaging tool (Ghost comes to mind).
If cost is a factor then there's a few Linux live CDs that will do what you want. This comes to mind. Put a second disk in the machine and image from the second disk unless you have fast networks and network storage; it's way to slow to go to and from the network regularly. If you're using a Linux live CD then you can actually set the second disk to EXT3 so Windows won't detect it and assign a drive letter too.
If you have a dedicated workstation for testing then I would highly recommend Symantec Ghost. Simply get the workstation to the clean state, reboot to ghost and 'take a snapshot' of the HD or partition. You can then replace the HD or partition from the image say from CD or multicasted over a network connection from another PC.
I have used it for years now, even to the point of automating the build of 60 test workstations (at the same time).
Recently the buzz of virtualization has reached my workplace where developers trying out virtual machines on their computers. Earlier I've been hearing from several different developers about setting up virtual machine in their desktop computers for sake of keeping their development environments clean.
There are plenty of Virtual Machine software products in the market:
Microsoft Virtual PC
Sun VirtualBox
VMWare Workstation or Player
Parallell Inc's Parallells Desktop
I'm interested to know how you use virtualization effectively in your work. My question is how do you use Virtual Machines for day-to-day development and for what reason?
I just built a real beefy machine at home so that I could run multiple VMs at once. My case is probably extreme though, but here is my logic for doing so.
Testing
When I test, particularly a desktop app, I typically create multiple VMs, one for each platform that my software should run on (Windows 2000/XP/Vista etc). If 32 and 64 bit flavors are available, I also build one of each. I also play with the VM hardware settings (e.g. lots of RAM, little RAM, 1 core, 2 core, etc). I found plenty of little bugs this way, that definitely would have made it into the wild had I not used this approach.
This approach also makes it easy to play with different software scenarios (what happens if the user installing the program doesn't have .NET 3.5 sp1? What happens if he doesn't have XXX component? etc?
Development
When I develop, I have one VM running my database servers (SQL2000/2005/2008). This is for two reasons. First, it is more realistic. In a production environment your app is probably not running on the same box as the db. Why not replicate it when you develop? Also, when I'm not developing (remember this is also my home machine), do I really need to have all of those database services running? Yes, I could turn them on and off manually, but its so much easier to switch a VM on.
Clients
If I want to show a client some web work I've done, I can put just a single VM into the DMZ and he can log into the VM and play with the web project, while the rest of my network/computer is safe.
Compatibility
Vista64 is now my main machine. Any older hardware/software I own will not play nicely with that OS. My solutions is to have Windows XP 32 as a VM for all of those items.
Here's something that hasn't been mentioned yet.
Whenever a project enter maintenance mode (aka abandonded), I create a VM with all the tools , libraries, and source code necessary to build the project. That way if I have to come back to it a year later, I won't bet bit in the ass by any upgraded tools or libraries on my workstation.
When I started at my current company, most support/dev/PM staff would run Virtual PC with 1-3 VMs on their desktop for testing.
After a few months I put together a proposal and now we use a VMware ESXi server running a pool of virtual machines (all on 24/7) with different environments for our support staff to test customer problems and reproduce issues on. We have VMs of Windows 2000/XP/Vista with each of Office 2000/2002/2003/2007 installed (so that's 12 VMs) plus some more general test VMs, some Server 2003/2008 machines running Citrix, Terminal Services, etc. Basically most of the time when we hit a new customer configuration that we need to debug, and it's likely other customers also have that configuration, I'll setup a VM for it. (eg. We're only using three 64-bit VMs at the moment - mostly it's 32bit)
On top of that the same server runs a XP VM that I use for building installers (InstallShield, WiX) debugging (VS 2005) and localization (Lingobit) as well as a second VM that our developers use for automated testing (TestComplete).
The development and installer VM have been allocated higher priority and are both configured as dual-cpu VMs with 1Gb memory. The remaining VMs have equal priority and 256-1Gb RAM.
Everything runs on a dual-quad-core Xeon with 8Gb of RAM running ESXi and hardware raid (4x1Tb RAID10)
For little more than US$2.5k investment we've improved productivity 10 fold (imagine the downtime while a support lackie installs an older version of office on their desktop to replicate a customer problem, or the time that I can't use my desktop because we're building installers). Next step will be to double the RAM to 16Gb as we add more memory hungry Server 2008 and Vista VMs.
We still have the odd VM on our desktops (I've got localized versions of Windows, Ubuntu and Windows 7 running under VMware Workstation for example) but the commonly/heavily used configurations have been offloaded to a dedicated server that we can all remotely connect into. Much, much easier.
Virtualisation (with snapshots or non-persistent disks) is really useful for testing software installation in a known clean configuration (i.e. nothing left over from previous buggy installs of your software).
Having your development box on a single file (with a Virtual Machine) will make it much easier to backup and restore if an issue occurs.
Other than that, you can also carry your portable development box around different machines, since you aren't restricted on that single particular machine you usually work on.
Not only that, but you can test on different Operating Systems at once, with a single OS installed on a each Virtual Machine file you have.
Believe me, this will save quite a hassle when doing the jobs I mentioned above.
Another nice use case for VMs is to create a virtual network of machines. For example you can bring up machines running the different tiers of your application stack, each running in its own VM. Think of it as a poor man's datacentre.
These VMs can also appear available on your physical network, so you can use RDP or similar to get a remote terminal session with them.
You can have a beefy machine (lots of memory) running these VMs, while you access them remotely from another machine such as a laptop, or whichever machine you have with the best screen.
I use a VM under Windows to run Linux. Even though there's already a version of emacs for windows, using it in Linux just feels more gratifying for some reason.
Maintaining shelved computers
I have the situation where schools in my region are closed down but their finance system has to be maintained for up to 2 years to ensure all outstanding bills are paid. This used to be handled by maintaining the hardware from the mothballed schools which had some problems:
This wasted scarce hardware resources and took up a lot of physical space.
Finance officers had to be physically present at the hardware to work on each system.
Today I host each mothballed school on its own virtual box inside a single physical host. Each individual system is accessed by rdp on the IP number of the host, but with its own port number and the original security of each school is maintained.
Finance officers can now work on the mothballed schools without having to travel to where they are physically located, there is more physical space in the server room and backup of all the mothballed schools at once is a simple automated process.
With each mothballed school in its own vbox there is no way for cross contamination of data between systems. Many thousands of dollars worth of hardware is also freed up for redeployment.
Virtualisation appears to be the perfect solution to this problem.
I used the Virtualization approach using VMWare Server when the task in front of me was to test a clustered environment of WebSphere Application Server. After setting up VMWare Server i created a new virtual machine and did all the software installations that i would need like WebSphere App Server, Oracle, WebSphere Commerce etc, after which i shutdown the VM, and copied over the virtual hard disk image to two different files, one as a clone VM and another as a backup.
Created a new VM and assigned the one of the copied disk images, so i got two systems up and running now which allowed me to test the same scenario of a clustered environment. I took a snapshot of the VM through VMware and if i goofed up with any activities i would revert the changes to the snapshot taken thereby going to the previous state and increasing my productivity instead of having to find out what to reverse. The backup disk image can also be used if i need to revert to a very old state, instead of having to start from scratch.
The snapshot functionality which exists in both VMWare and Microsoft's Virtual PC/Server is good enough to consider Virtualization for scenarios where you think you might do breaking changes, which may not be that easy to revert.
From what I know, there is nothing like Parallels on Mac, but rather for work instead of testing.
The integration (with "coherence", your VM is not running "in a window" of your host system, all programs in the guest system have their proper window in the host system) is splendid and let's you fill all (ALL!) gaps:
My coworker has it configured that Outlook (there is nothing like Outlook for MacOsX) in Windows pops up when he clicks on a "mailto:"-link on a web page, browsed with Firefox on Mac !
In the other direction, if he get's send a PDF, he doubleclicks the attachment in Outlook (in Windows) which opens the PDF-File in the Mac-buildin PDF-viewer.
VirtualBox also offers this window-separation possibility (at least when windows is running in the VM on Linux), which is really useful for work.
For testing etc. of course, there is nothing like a cleanly separated environment.
We have a physical server dedicated to hosting virtual machines in our development environment. The virtual machines are brought up and torn down on a regular basis and are used for testing software on known Standard Operating Environments.
It is also really helpful when we want an application to run on a domain that is different to the development environment.
Also, the organisation I am working for are in the planning stage to create a large virtual testing ground. This will be a large grid of machines, sitting on it's own network, and all of the organisations' internal staff, contractors and third-party vendors will be able to stage their software for testing purposes prior to implementing into the production environment. The virtual machines will reflect the physical machines in the production environment.
It sounds great, but everyone's a bit skeptical: This is a Government organisation... Bureaucracy and red-tape will probably turn this into a big waste of time and money.
If we are using Virtual machine (vpc 2007,Virtual Server 2005,VMWare application etc..)
1.We can run multiple operating systems(windows98,2000,XP,Vista,Windows Server 2003,2008,Windows 7/linux/solaris) on a single server
2.We can Reduce hardware costs & Data Center Space
3.We can Reduce power & AC cooling cost.
4.We can reduce admin resource,
5.We can reduce Application Cost
6.We can run ADS/DNS/DHCP/Exchange/SQL/Sharepoint Server/File Server...etc
I'm trying to remotely control a Macintosh computer. I know that in the Windows world, you can use Remote Desktop to connect from one Windows computer to another Windows computer. This works relatively well.
I know that you can use a VNC server but this isn't always the most secure or give the best performance. Are there other options available for remotely connecting to a Mac?
In some situations Copilot is a good solution. Not so much for day-to-day admin, but great for remote tech support.
If you need the solution to be cross-platform (ie, controlling an OS X box from Windows) then VNC is the obvious choice. I've had much better luck with the free Vine VNC Server than with Apple's built in one. As for viewers, Chicken of the VNC on OS X or Tight VNC on Windows are good solutions.
As others have said, for security firewall VNC and then use an SSH tunnel. There's lots of ways to do that, and the exact details depends on OS, firewall, network, etc. One method of creating an SSH tunnel for VNC is described here.
If you're trying to connect from one (Leopard) Mac to another, you can use the built-in Screen Sharing functionality; turn the server on from the Sharing System Preferences pane, and either use the network browser (on a LAN) or just open a vnc:// URL.
If you're trying to manage a bunch of Macs, try Apple's Remote Desktop (ARD) software; it's sold in 10- and unlimited-client versions, so if you've got fewer than 5 or so Macs it's probably not worth the money. The client bits for ARD are part of OS X. Screen Sharing and ARD use the same protocol, which includes some Apple-proprietary extensions to VNC which do encryption (either of all data, or of just keystroke/password info) and support adaptive JPEG compression, which gives you decent-enough performance (usable, but nothing like RDP or NX unfortunately).
If you need something cross-platform, check out TeamViewer (which will punch through firewalls and so forth).
Apple's Remote Desktop has AES encryption. Another good way is to just enable SSH in sharing and use shell access to perform tasks without interrupting the user.
http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/
^That's your best solution.
If you go into the Settings panel, you can find a variety of other remote access options including SSH.
You can use VNC which is built into Tiger.
Yeah, VNC is good, but what about Apple's Remote Desktop?
If you are looking for a free, secure solution: I would recommend using any of a number of VNC servers that are available, blocking the ports that VNC uses to communicate, and then using SSH tunneling to connect. This way, ssh is encrypting everything, and you can still rely on free, open source (?), and cross platform standards for controlling the Desktop remotely.
Citrix, the people behind pc anywhere and the windows remote desktop have a hosted app called "Go to my pc" https://www.gotomypc.com/
I've heard people says it good.
I personally like RHUB's service for remote access and collaboration. It's an appliance that's easy to use and very secure. The device works from behind your firewall (instead of outside of it).
if you need low bandwidth or cross platform there's RDP server for mac that also offers there own iRapp protocol
from their site:
http://www.coderebel.com/2013/11/08/irapp-mac-client-available-download
Lowest supported speed: 512 kbit/s (64 KB/s) for iRAPP protocol
By adjusting the image quality you are able to make iRAPP work on
lower bandwidth connections as recommended above.
iRapp TS (Mac Terminal Server) allows multiple users to connect one
Mac simultaneously