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Archives for 2010

Convert VMware Fusion to Parallels

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This is just a quick post since it seems Parallels doesn’t have this information posted anywhere on their site.

I am making the conversion from VMware Fusion to Parallels at the advice of a friend who said Parallels was faster. But the problem is, I have about 10 VMware Virtual Machines, so I really would like to convert them.

Put simply, it’s easy (albeit slow).

Just go to “File” and “Open” and open the VMware HD image. Done and done. One would think “Import” is the better description, but, it’s “Open”.

Have fun!

Barrel of Munkis

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A year or so ago, a chunk of my client base (the employees of the school), complained that they often didn’t have the same–or rather most recent–software. This presented an issue since our primary method of deploying new software was just re-imaging machines. Given all our employee machines have local accounts, re-imaging would be a serious task. So we started thinking about it, and started drawing up early plans for converting everyone over to PHDs. But, that was going to be a heck of a task, and there doesn’t seem to be an established way of doing it (something I’m still investigating since it’s still on the list of tasks).

But then in the last few months, I heard about Puppet, and via that, Munki. They’re very similar tools, but Munki gives more attention to the GUI interface for users to say “Yes, I want to logout and run these updates”. Puppet does this all in the background.

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Portable Home Directories and you!

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Since about 2003, lab computers where I work were network home based (before that, we used something called MacAdmin, which would sync people’s files on login and logout). Network Home Directories (NHDs from now on), are “okay”. They used to work quite well. Around Tiger (10.4) (Spotlight specifically), things started their slow progress downhill with NHDs.

First, disabling Spotlight completely to keep it from indexing stuff over the network. Then redirecting ~/Library/Caches, and then more and more redirects since Microsoft and Adobe play the easy “card” of “We don’t support working over the network”. While most things would work, they wouldn’t work perfectly. As Leopard (10.4) aged, things got sketchier as I found a really annoying bug in AFP that we hit, but didn’t get addressed until Snow Leopard (10.6). Which, we addressed by upgrading the servers to 10.6, but the clients stayed on 10.5, and continued to use NHDs. NHDs would have been completely useless if it hadn’t been for Network Home Redirector (NHR) from Jeff Ochsner. I contributed a bit, but mostly, used it fairly vanilla.

But, things just didn’t work well. Programs were slow, someone accidentally capturing in Final Cut Pro to their Documents folder would slow everyone to a crawl, and we had to enforce user quotas to keep usage in check. And user quotas would cause problems with student groups that needed to share larger files.

So, after 7 years of things “working”, we finally bit the bullet this last summer break, and moved everyone over to Portable Home Directories, with Preference syncing. Basically, users still get a consistent user experience, but their files don’t travel with them. We did this largely because: 1. Thumb drives are cheap. 2. Incoming students are required to purchase external HDs. and 3. Dropbox, gmail, etc are all good ways to move files around.

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