Apple Remote Desktop 1.2 Released

sirisaac82 writes "Apple released version 1.2 of its Remote Desktop software. According to the website, new features include Remote Software Installation and Remote Network Startup Disk. Too bad it wasn't released yesterday, or you could have had a few more pranks to pull on those annoying co-workers."

Comments

SPOILER

[epsalon]

The code votes for perl in the current poll.

Re:pretty cool snippet

[Black Copter Control]

Shame it didn't run on my win32 system, even under cygwin, or on my VMS system, even under bash.

If my guess is right, the following (relatively trivial) modification should do the trick:

perl -e 's^^odqk -d +trd HOB::Nodm2; nodm2(Sn,Sh,"sdkmds rk`rgcns.nqf 80"); oqhms Sh pp|FDS /onkkAnnsg.ok?phc=920&`hc=4&lncd=mnbnlldms GSSO/1.1[mGnrs: rk`rgcns.nqf[m[m|; oqhms pp|[m[m|." "w10 .pp|Itrs `mnsgdq Odqk G`bjdq![m[m (iddyd, cn xnt itrs qtm `mx bncd xnt rdd, nq vg`s?!)[m[m|; vghkd (<Sn>) z oqhms he l/unsdc.{qdfhrsdqdc./ |+^; $_.=join(q||,qx,${_},) if y&\x40-\x7c\x2b\n\r&\x41-\x7d\x27\x20\x20& ; print'

(12 extra characters)
probably won't work on an ibm (ebcdic) system.

If this fixes it, then it's a browser translation induced problem.. not a perl problem. The equivalent in C++ would have failed in exactly the same way.

Wow !

[Utopia]

The multiple observe classroom feature seems pretty neat!
Windows can do this too (See Shadowing Remote Desktop)
but it isn't as elegent as Apple's solution.

Remote Installation

[rsmith-mac]

I think a lot of people will underestimate the importance of Remote Installation, but this feature is critical to using OS X in large environments. At the moment, you can use products such as Filewave to keep software up to date, but this all goes out the window when it comes to system software - MacOS updates, Quicktime, and even security updates. Apple's installer packages run necessary pre and post installation scripts, and up to now, there hasn't been a remote solution for MacOS X to do anything similar, meaning you couldn't remotely do these updates except by using SSH to run CLI programs(which in turn still limits you, as you're still virtually visiting every machine).

With 1.2, it's now possible to remotely run installer packages en-mass, allowing you to push out software updates, and this is huge. While it's not necessarily the best solution for software updates, 1.2 will none the less allow admins to maintain more X machines than before, enabling large-scale deployments. This is crucial for Apple, as one of the things holding X back has been the lack of remote updates, which means they'll finally be able to break X in to the largest organizations.

This may be a .1 update, but the ramifications of it are huge.

Re:Remote Installation

[SlamMan]

Asr has some limitations for tthis sort of thing. Most notably, it doesn't install, it only copies. Asr is the best thing under the sun when you want to toss an image on a new drive (usuualy about an hour faster than ccc), but no so good when you want to update quicktime on all the machines.

Re:RealVNC

[Hanji]

OSXvnc.
Very nice, and easy to use. It's even got (more-or-less) builtin support for launching it from a shell.

Re:RealVNC

[Smurf]

I suppose that you want something like OSXvnc, which allows you to share your main (and only) quartz display.

But you may also want to check out Xvnc for MacOS X, which allows you to share secondary X Window sessions (:1 through :99, in theory). This is one of the few huge advantages of X over Quartz/Aqua: you can create several simultaneous sessions that are kept alive independently, and that may be created by different users. It is a really useful feature but unfortunately you can only launch X applications in them, not common Cocoa/Carbon/Classic ones, and you need an X-Win window manager such as WindowMaker or AfterStep or even a full desktop environment as KDE or Gnome.

Re:No update for OS 9.x clients

[davebo]

Actually, it says at the bottom of the page (ya know, this one) that this update "allows administration of desktop and notebook computers running Mac OS 8.1 through Mac OS 9.2, or Mac OS X v10.1 or later."

So it looks like there's something there for the older OS.

CORRECTION: here is the update for OS 9.x clients

[teridon]

It was just not linked from the main page -- one had to search the knowledge base to find it.

Read about it/download it here.