Mark Vaughn's Weblog

Weblog of Mark Vaughn, and IT professional and vExpert specializing in Enterprise Architecture, virtualization, web architecture and general technology evangelism

Month: December 2011

Time for Change

December 30, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Well, I have been with INX for almost 18 months now, and it is time for a change…kind of. Actually, I am not going anywhere, but INX is changing. You may have noticed the press releases over the last few weeks about Presidio purchasing INX, and that transaction closed December 30. The final press release is located here. In fact, Presidio was purchased by American Securities mid-2011. With Presidio and INX together, American Securities has created an IT consulting and services force that will dominate the market in 2012.

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So what does this mean for Presidio and INX clients? Expect a lot more of the same high quality work, with some dramatic improvements. We now have a bigger footprint, a deeper pool of knowledge, even better vendor relationships and a roster full of rock stars in IT (http://www.presidio.com/about-presidio/technical-expertise.php – as impressive as it is, I know this list is not complete yet).

Presidio was roughly twice the size of INX in people and revenue. Together, we now have 1,800 IT professions, with over 800 of those being highly skilled consulting engineers. We also have over 45 offices across the United States. Where Presidio offices were heavily concentrated east of the Mississippi, INX was heavily concentrated west of the Mississippi. Both Presidio and INX have been dominant forces in their markets, with little crossover. This lends itself to a very easy transition that allows most INX offices to simply become regional offices within Presidio. More of those details will be made public in the future, but those are not the important details. Two highly effective and very successful service providers are merging, and a great deal of attention is being paid to leveraging the strengths of both organizations as we become the largest solution provider in the United States.

I have been involved in more mergers than I can count, and I can tell you that this one looks to be the smoothest transition that I have ever seen. I fully expect this new organization to be much greater than the sum of Presidio and INX put together. Just take a look at the impressive list of awards and recognitions that this new organization has racked up (http://www.presidio.com/about-presidio/awards-and-recognition.php).  As you look at that list, realize that this was achieved by Presidio and INX working separately, then think of what we will achieve as the new Presidio. 1 + 2 is going to equal 5, and I am excited to be a part of it.

The last 18 months have been a great ride, but I have a feeling it was just a warm up lap for the ride we have ahead of us. In fact, I think that 2012 will be so great that we will need 366 days to accommodate all of the awesomeness 😉

VMware View client for the iPhone

December 30, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Disclaimer: I am an avid VMware user and I work from a VMware View 5 desktop on a regular basis.

With that being said, I am still disappointed in VMware’s lack of a View Client for the iPhone. They have created a client for the iPad, with full PCoIP support. In fact, this is a very impressive client with creative solutions to the “touchscreen to mouse” problems when using an OS like Windows XP or Windows 7 that was not created for use on a touchscreen device. Using gestures and even a virtual trackpad, navigating a Windows desktop in this client is pretty intuitive.

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VMware has also released a similar client for Android, working on both Android tablets and phones. However, the iPad client WILL NOT WORK ON THE IPHONE! This is very frustrating. As I ask around within VMware, I regularly hear that there is no interest in the end-user community for an iPhone client. On that point, I have to disagree. I am not only an end-user that would love to have this client, but I regularly work with customers that are also asking for this feature. Look at almost any blog post written on the topic, and the comments will be full of people asking for VMware to provide an iPhone client.

With as much discussion as I see and hear for this, it escapes me why VMware thinks there is no interest. Is the iPhone the ideal format for accessing a VDI desktop, no. However, if you want “anywhere, anytime” access to your desktop, your smartphone is the one device you always have with you. I currently have to leave RDP enabled on my VDI desktop, which prohibits me from using some advanced PCoIP features. However, I do this to support the WYSE Pocket Cloud app on my iPhone, as that is the only way to access my desktop in a pinch. On several occasions, I have had to resort to this method for fulfilling quick requests or fixing issues prior to performing a demo.

Even if I am an anomaly, and no one else would ever use this feature, I am still surprised that VMware has not placed a higher priority on it. If nothing else, I would have thought this would be a marketing priority. Even if no one will use it, this is an item that VMware needs on the menu.

If you agree, or disagree, let me know. Hopefully, VMware is listening and will make the iPhone View client an early 2012 gift.

Issues with Synergy2 and OSX Lion

December 29, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Almost two years ago, I published a blog post on using Synergy2 to share a single keyboard/mouse with multiple computers. At the time, I was using Windows XP, OSX 10.5 and SuSE Linux. (http://blog.mvaughn.us/2010/02/26/synergy-mac-windows-linux-get-along/). Scott Lowe also did a recent post on Synergy.

Over the holidays, Santa was nice enough to bring me a new iMac for video editing. However, since I am not totally getting rid of my old XP workstation that was my former video editing platform, this was really pushing my limits on desktop real estate. On days like today, when I am also using my work laptop, the three computers and keyboards were simply too much. Time to setup Synergy2.

However, this time I ran into some real issues with using my iMac as the Synergy server. The mouse was working fine on other desktops, but the keyboard was sending all commands to the iMac, regardless of what screen the mouse was on. I finally ran the Synergy2 server as root and all worked fine. That was not acceptable, I did not want this to run as root. However, that did narrow down the issues and I finally found the answer in this thread on a similar issue (Post #102 – http://code.google.com/p/synergy-plus/issues/detail?id=47).

To save you the time, you need to go into OSX “System Preferences” and select “Universal Access” in the upper right corner:

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Once there, check the box for “Enable access for assistive devices”

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After that, I could run the Synergy2 server as a non-root user and all of the keyboard issues went away. If you are experiencing a similar issue, I hope that this helps.

Read-Write NTFS on Mac

December 29, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I recently added two new Macs to my collection, with OSX Lion. As with all of my Macs, one of the first things that I did was to add NTFS read/write support. It was a little different with Lion, so I put together a quick post for anyone else looking to do this.

First, go to http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/2010/09/ntfs-3g-for-mac-os-x-201088.html and follow the “NTFS-3G for Mac OS X 2010.8.8” link under the “Download” section to get the NTFS-3G files.

Next, open the “ntfs-3g-2010.8.8-macosx.dmg” file that you just downloaded

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Double-click “Install NTFS-3G”. Acknowledge the warning that comes up:

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Select “Continue”:

Select “Continue” to acknowledge the license:

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And then “Agree” to the license statement:

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Then click on “Install” to begin the installation:

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I always select “No Caching” here, as I use mostly USB devices for NTFS and occassionally forget to cleanly unmount them (oops):

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At the end of the installation, click on “Restart” to complete the install:

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Though it always worked well for me in Snow Leopard, NTFS-3G did not work in Lion…so there are a few more steps to complete this. For the time being, ignore these errors:

After the reboot, you will now need to download OSXFuse to replace MacFuse that came with NTFS-3G. To do that, go to http://osxfuse.github.com and click on the download link in the upper right hand corner to get the OSXFUSE-2.3.8.dmg file. Once complete, mount the dmg file:

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From here, click on “Install OSXFUSE 2.3”. The next several steps will look familiar from the NTFS-3G install. Click “Continue”:

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Click “Continue” again to acknowledge the license:

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Click “Agree” to accept the license:

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The first two install options should already be checked. Also check the “MacFUSE Compatibility Layer” box and click on “Continue”:

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Click “Install” one more time to begin the installation:

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OSXFUSE does not ask for a restart like NTFS-3G did, so you should be able to simply click “Close” at the end of the installation.

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You should now see “FUSE for OS X” and “NTFS-3G” in your System Preferences for OSX (on my MacBook Pro, OSXFUSE removed MacFUSE, but it did not on my iMac…odd)

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From here, I was able to mount NTFS volumes as read/write. To be safe, you may want to perform one more restart.

Now, this method worked and I have moved a LOT of data to and from USB mounted NTFS volumes, I do still get this error on occassion:

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However, in each case, the volume actually was mounted. If I have time, I will look into this further and post an update with anything that I find. Until then, I will just continue to ignore the message as it is not accurate.

This was definitely easier to setup in Snow Leopard than in Lion, though both reportedly have full NTFS support present but disabled. Hopefully Apple will enable this support in the native OS soon.

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