OSX Apple Remote Desktop Active Directory Logins From A Windows Client (Remotix)

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Category: Tech Blog
Published on Monday, 25 March 2013 21:59
Written by William Roush
Hits: 141

A few weeks ago we got our Mac Mini in, quickly got ESXi on it, and proceded to run a handful of OSX VMs on it for various development purposes, mainly servers to test our software on... However I ran into one major issue:

 

How are we to share these machines?

 

I had a few requirements I should lay out first:

  • Needs to be able to authenticate with our local Active Directory server.
  • Needs to obey Apple's virtual terminal permissions (either requesting shared access or starting a new virtual terminal, not using VNC).
  • Needs to work on Windows (no, can't just buy a Macbook, defeats the purpose of this setup).

A promising piece of software I stumbled upon was Remotix For Windows, it was a much nicer interface than other VNC products, and boasted integration with OSX logins... score!

However Active Directory logins were failing, and the steps to get them working are a bit cryptic if you don't know what you're looking for, and took quite a bit of looking for me to dig up all of the steps required to get it to work. Now I'm going to assume a couple things:

  • You can log in via an Active Directory account on the console of the machine.
  • You have Apple Remote Desktop enabled.

First thing, we need to enable directory logins on Apple Remote Deskop, we'll enable it by running this:

/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -cofnigure -clientopts -setdirlogins -dirlogins yes

 Then we'll need to grant users access to Apple Remote Desktop by creating a local "ard_admin" group, and tying Active Directory groups to it, we'll do that by running these two commands:

dseditgroup -o create ard_admin
dseditgroup -o edit -a 'YOURDOMAIN\your_ad_admin_group' -t group ard_admin

At this point I restarted OSX so that the ARD settings took affect.

Now you should be able to fire up Remotix, connect to the machine and provide Active Directory credentials and log in.

 

 

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VMWare - vSphere 5 Licensing

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Category: Virtualization
Published on Saturday, 16 July 2011 19:28
Written by William Roush
Hits: 899

We've been eagerly awaiting vSphere 5 for awhile now, and it has been less than a week since VMWare made their big announcement including new features, but more important to most of us at this time, their new licensing model.

 

Now we're looking at these numbers for virtualization licensing costs:

  • $995 - per CPU + 24GB vRAM
  • $2875 - per CPU + 32GB vRAM
  • $3495 - per CPU + 48GB vRAM

 

This has sparked quite the uproar in the VMWare community, as of writing which includes a 28,000 view, 40 page threadnaught which includes complaints from clients and vendors about canceled orders and requests to migrate, and some of the largest responses their Facebook community has ever seen, to which VMWare almost makes fun of the situation with cute vRAM mascots.

 

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