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

Re:ecode is your friend

[Anonymous Coward]

If this doesn't prove perl is superior, I don't know what could:

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&\x41-\x7d\x27&; print'

(give it a few seconds to run, theres a lot going on here :)

Re:ecode is your friend

[lars]

Well, it certainly obeys the 2nd law of thermodynamics.

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.

Re:ecode is your friend

[Loligo]

That looks like it should have ended with "NO CARRIER".

-l

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.

Re:Wow !

[Mononoke]

Perhaps if they managed to teach kids something, then I might tolerate it, but seeing as most kids learn jack-shit from school.

You can thank parents for that problem. Especially parents who fail to teach their children to respect elders.

Teaching (and learning) begins at home. If it doesn't, it never occurs in school.

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

[rsmith-mac]

Even with scripting, you're more limited than with this. I took a crack at using ARD 1.1 to push out installer packages as modified startup items, but it has a couple of problems, not the least of which is that the user has to reboot before it's executed, and then there's no way to stop the bootup process when it does get executed. I also designed(but never coded out) a process of using cron to execute the contents of a directory pushed out by ARD, but that still shared some of the same problems.

The fact of the matter is that for $499, I can highlight some 200 machines, click a button, select a package, and then let ARD take care of the rest. X may be a Unix, but it doesn't nessisarily need to work like one. I don't want to waste my time scripting, even if I do only need to do it once, I have an Xserve RAID I'd much rather be setting up, and from a market standpoint, a lot of people feel the same way. If Apple wants to break in to the biggest of the big leagues, they need something like this, not just letting an admin try their hand at scripting, and hope that's sucessful and converts in to a sale.

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.

RealVNC

[White Roses]

I'd really like a RealVNC solution (or compatible) for Mac OS X. I'm using VNCThing to view RealVNC servers from my iMac, but I haven't found much satisfaction in serving VNC off my iMac yet.

Hints?

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.

Best thing....

[WasterDave]

The best thing about this is you can have an unlimited licence for five hundred bucks. It's a bit touch and go as a way to help my mother in law sort stuff out remotely, but for installations much over about a dozen machines it must be a complete no-brainer.

Dave

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.

Remote Desktop = Incredibe Enterprise Savings

[MachineShedFred]

I work in the IS department of an enterprise environment where Macs are used to make print advertisements (big shock there.)

Moving forward to Mac OS X, one of the big question marks we had was how to push out OS updates. Under the existing Mac OS 9 infrastructure, we would have to either try to FileWave it out if it was just some extensions, or write some gawd-awful perl script with inline applescript to do some of this stuff.

With this remote install feature, now we can use the FREE package builder that comes on the development CD, and also is included in the NetInstall tools of Mac OS X Server to make a .pkg file of anything we want to put out there (default preferences, custom scripts, aliases to pain-in-the-ass SMB shares, etc.) or use pre-existing .pkg files and spew them across the network to unsuspecting users.

I can't wait to get out from behind this firewall to get it through Software Update. If this thing is scriptable too, I think I've found my long-awaited answer to the PC guys' Tivoli deployment scheme. FOR $500, I might add.

Thank you Apple!

Interesting issue upgrading

[peaceful_bill]

Hi all

I have encountered a very interesting problem while upgrading from 1.1 to 1.2 ARD. On the main status window, I have client computers that flash in for a few seconds and then dissapear! I have successfully used ARD since September in a lab with 28 flat panel imacs, static IP addresses, and no DHCP.

Other details: All the machines (including the one's that are errantly popping up my list are on the asme subnet (255.255.0.0). The machines I _want_ to manage are 10.2.4, the ones that are popping on my list are 8.6 and 9. The 8.6 on'es are running under an At Ease environment.

I have spoken with Apple Tech support, erased my ARD installation using a shell script that Apple provided; I've also erased my com.apple.Remotedesktop.plists's

When I spoke with Apple, they mentioned that they were aware of a few other people having this problem.

Any suggestions? Bill