Mac remote viewing

So for todays challenge I'm trying to come up with a solution to view my MacLab computers as a set of thumbnails for ease of monitoring and troubleshooting.  Macs make remote viewing pretty straightforward and easy  on a 1:1 level, simply enable Screen Sharing or Remote Management in the sharing tab of the preferences and then navigate to the machine in the network directory, click the Share Screen button, enter credentials and you're there.  This is great for troubleshooting individual machines however I'm interestyed in finding a solution which allows me to monitor a series of machines at the same time without having to establish 25 seperate connections.

 

While there are many paid options (Apple offers one that is supposedly stellar . . . for $300+) I'm gonna do my Lassalian best to find a free OpenSource option.  To that end I am playing with a Java application called VncThumbnailViewer which seems to do the trick without a bunch of bells and whistles.  First thing to do is to activate the VNC server on the remote computer . . . in OSX 10.6 the control is located within the sharing tab of the preferences.  Check & highlight the "Remote Management" box and then click on the "Computer Settings" button on the right.  In the resulting dialog box check the "VNC viewers may control screen with password:" box and enter a password.

 

Now back on the viewing computer open up the VncThumbnailViewer, go to File>Add New host and enter the appropriate information and you should see your computer screen pop up in the window.  So far the only problem I am encountering is that my computer names and their host names aren;t jiving up together, for some reason the machines have retained the hostname of a machine which previously populated the IP address (I'm in a static IP environment for this project) so now I will look into that.

 

And that was simple enough . . . gotta love Sudo . . . in order to change the hostname just go into a teminal and run

sudo hostname new_hostname

replacing new_hostname with your new hostname.

Two posts in one day! (aka fun w/ MS Office)

OK, so now for my second post in one day (insert fireworks here!!!) I will be attempting to stop MS Office from running the Windows Installer when a network user access' the software for the first time. Currently when an AD user logs in to a system and o[ens up MS Word (or any other Office App) for the first time it wants to do the installer and prep for first use stuff. I'm not really sure how to disable this (can I? doesn't the software need to get your username, etc.?) but one thought I've had is to see if I can pass a -s (silent) parameter somewhere along the line or perhaps clone the generic user info? Well . . . here goes nothing!

 

Two (business) days in a row!!!

And I'm back, two days in a row (well, 2 business days anyhow!) What kind of fun will we have today? MS Office registration, phones, mac server & wifi issues are all on task today, lets jump right in.

So, we have a new Mac lab here at school and while I love the look (nice and clean) and I love the machines it has been a nightmare getting them to play well with our existing (MS Server 2003 & mostly WinXP boxes) from setting up the OSX server to integrating them all together. WHile the list of problems is long the task today will be working with Eclipse on a Mac in a networked environment. The problem is that the software wants to create its workspace on the local drive which means that my network users with a network home need to create a local space in order to do their work. While this works it means that the user is always tied to a machine and that we don't have backup copies of the files in case of emergency. I've played with command line and preference files t no avail and am now going to create a user group for the class which will set mobile accounts for those selected users, and we're off . . .

1. create a group in the AD called APComputerScience and add a test user to the group (if all works as expected I will add the entire class to the group.)
2. Open the workgroup manager on the OSX server and create a group named APComputerScience_osx with the AD group as its member set.
3. Log in as a user in the APComputerScience group and choose the appropriate group on login so the mac creates a mobile profile and . . . wow it works!!!

Well, I suppose I could keep trying to get it so I can do it "right" but as this seems to be a workable solution I'll stop while I'm ahead and create another entry for the next step of fun for the day . . . fun with MS Office!!!

And a third post - now we're on to phones

OK, so technically this may end up being the second post, or maybe it won't land until tomorrow, or maybe not at all (OK, I;All publish it at some point complete or not!)

So far today I've played with Macs and integration with Eclipse (Success!!!) and multiple network users of MS Office on AD (not quite yet . . .) and now we are gonna play with the phone system for a while. So in way of background I'm dealing with a Neaxmail AD-64 VMX system and a MatWorX32 PBX, neither piece of software is fun to deal with and I need to figure out a few transfer and vmx issues.

1. First issue is simply an errant voice mail box which won't give the user access, easy enough.  Log in to the Admin Console and reset his account for first time enroll, log in and set up his pass, etc. and hope it allows him access from his end.  I'm not sure why it didn't work when we tried it from his room but this should get us where we need to be.
2. a phone with a mouthpiece that sounds like it is set at 1 out of 10.  Working on the assumption that the hand piece itself is faulty I pulled a BU handset and replaced the existing one . . . strike on, apparently this handset works fine in the mic but  the speaker is toast (note to future self - cross breed these two devices to create one that actually functions!), so on the next try with a different handset all is well . . . ah, if the other issues could just be as simpatico!
3. Now on to our Lobby phone . . . apparently it no longer has the access to place Long Distance calls and we are unable to transfer calls to it from the main office line . . . and it appears that changing the Trunk Restriction from Non-Restricted 2 (RCB) to Non-Restricted 1 (RCB) seems to take care of the problem
4. And now for the real fun . . . trying to get phones to transfer to the correct vmx boxes. So, what I have is a phone line which apparently doesn't have a secondary line or a virtual line (greek to you right?  It's OK, it doesn't make much more sense to me!) so I need to dig through this arcane manual and figure out how to create one.  So we hit a series of buttons getting us into command mode on the phone itself in order to manage this thing and now I need to find an available LEN to create the virtual line . . . oh so close. AND WE HAVE A WINNER!!! After digging around I figured it out, found an available Virtual LEN, assigned the transfer mailbox to it and voila!!!  (note to self cmd11)

Getting back into this thing (maybe?)

So, this blog is pretty sparse (OK, really sparse) but I'm gonna try and get myself functioning on a bit more of a functional level now and actually post stuff, who knows, maybe I'll learn something in the process!!!

So for today's fun and excitement I will be attempting to convince a WinTel machine to not create a new user profile every time a new network user logs on. First thing to try is to remove the "STUBPATH" registry entry based on advice from Mr Gates himself (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/238441) . . . & wow - it actually seems to have worked! Now when a user logs in on a new (or re imaged) system we don't have to wait while it runs all the personalized settings stuff.

Now let's see if I can convince the machine to not run the Windows Installer on MS Office when a user opens it for the first time . . .

OK, so I've tried a zillion different registry hacks to no avail, now just gonna nuke it and reinstall (uninstall, run ccleaner to clean registry, reinstall as a domain admin with all options set to run from computer) and see what happens, fingers crossed and . . .

Didn't work, feel free to leave me any suggestions (as if anyone but me is gonna read this!) below and I'm out for the weekend, have a good one.

SC