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.

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

[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:RealVNC

[Hanji]

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

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: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.

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.