Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I found some old Windows 95 CDs in the attic, so I created a virtual machine to remind myself how far we’ve come. I was very amused to see this in the setup:

“Quick View - Enables you to preview a document without opening it.”

Those of us who use Leopard recognize something similar.

“Using Quick Look in Leopard, you can view the contents of a file without even opening it.”

I don’t remember using Quick View in Windows 95, but I do find Quick Look in Leopard to be very useful. What’s most interesting to me is that, even with all of the advancements over the past dozen years or so, many of the core ideas behind computing are the same.

Last night my friend Mike and I decided it was time to upgrade the Xserve that hosts this site from 10.4.10 to 10.5.0. We traveled downtown to the co-lo facility, and immediately discovered that we had been locked out. The card reader at the door did not respond to our swipes. We called someone from Time Warner to let us into the room, and he informed us that the card reader system had just been upgraded, so there may be some kinks.

We installed the Leopard upgrade, and when the server rebooted, it told us the serial number provided with the software was invalid. A trip to the Apple support discussion forums provided the answer. It’s a known bug. We entered the new serial number with Server Admin on another Mac, then rebooted the Xserve, and then re-entered the serial number again during the setup. Not a giant deal, but a tad annoying.

The server started and all of our settings had been migrated perfectly. All services were running that should be running. All OD users and their properties had been preserved. We tested to make sure web pages were being served. Everything seemed to be functioning properly, so we left, knowing that once the door closed behind us, we couldn’t get back in because TW had screwed up the card reader.

When we got back to Mike’s house, we discovered that nothing worked anymore, and we had no way to get back into the room because it was late and we doubted anyone from TW was going to be happy about helping us. Plus, our sites and personal e-mail hosted ont he Xserve aren’t that critical, so we left it down overnight.

This morning, the lady at TW informs us that she forgot to migrate our accounts from the old card server to the new one, and she apologizes and tells us it should be corrected within a few hours. Three hours later, Mike is able to get into the co-lo room.

The Xserve has kernel panicked. Somehow or another, both NICs had been assigned the same IP address (which wasn’t the case when the machine had been running Tiger) and that was enough to make the machine panic after a short but random amount of time. (I suspect there’s something more to it, but we wanted the server up ASAP so we didn’t go too deep.) Mike removed one NIC, assigned the correct IP to the internal NIC, and all was well again.

Until we noticed e-mail wasn’t being delivered. It turns out there’s a bug in Leopard server 10.5.0 where mail doesn’t get delivered to mailboxes defined by aliases in Workgroup Manager. And wouldn’t you know it, all the mailboxes on our server are WGM aliases. Luckily, this PDF at topicdesk.com explains how to implement Postfix aliases as a workaround until Apple fixes the problem. The error in the SMTP logs, by the way, for those of you who are curious, and for Google, was:

550-Mailbox unknown. Either there is no mailbox associated with this 550-name or you do not have authorization to see it.

So, after a TW screw-up and three Apple bugs, an upgrade and associated troubleshooting we should have had completed by the time we finished our pizza last night turned into roughly 24 hours downtime. I have truly wasted my life.

Here’s what I’d like someone who knows how to use Photoshop to do for me:

Start with a Finder window. In the the side bar at the left, make a heading for CONNECTED and SERVERS, with disclosure triangles. Put a few machines under each heading.

In the content area of the window, where files and folders are shown, put a screen capture of a Windows desktop.

In the title bar and tool bar up top, add a button set like the CoRD picture two posts down.

Ta da! There’s the new Microsoft RDC interface. Not hard.

Your reward for creating this graphic will be my thanks, and I’ll post it on the page. Bonus points for a properties window (invoked by command-i, of course) showing the settings for each connection in the side bar.

By amazing coincidence, Microsoft released RDC beta 2 today with “multiple sessions redesigned and improved“. And they are so sooo close, but they still don’t quite have it right.

There is a File… New… option to open… a new copy of RDC! That’s better but it’s not right. I can’t think of any other app (at least the ones I use) that start another instance of the application to make another connection or open another file. Those apps simply open a new window as part of the already-running application. My Dock is crowded enough without half a dozen identical icons to the right side.

Why can’t Microsoft figure this out? I don’t understand the logic behind their approach, and as much as I hear from the Mac BU how much they love the Mac just like we do, I can’t fathom why they have this so wrong, because it’s obvious they don’t understand some basic things. In the upcoming Office 2008, will opening multiple Word documents or Excel spreadsheets cause a second instance of the respective application to open? I sure hope not. Will composing an e-mail in Entourage cause a second copy of Entourage to be launched? I doubt it. So why does RDC behave this way? Does their RDC development team actually use Mac OS X?

It would also behoove them to create a sidebar, like CoRD has, (It actually has a drawer, I know.) where saved connections can be selected quickly, you can see at a glance what connections are active, and you can manage settings for each individual connection. This business with having to save individual files for each RDC connection is dumb. They need to create a folder, ~/Library/Application Support/Mirosoft RDC, and write a plist file containing the settings for the connections to be shown in the side bar. I’m not a Mac developer, and even I understand how this is supposed to work.

There are some other improvements in this beta, but because I so often need multiple connections open, those improvements mean little to me because the basics of this app are so messed up.

This is CoRD.

It is free. The interface is better than your RDC client by leaps and bounds. How is it that a freeware developer understands the basics of how a remote control app should work, and the coders at Microsoft do not?

CoRD is a Mac OS X remote desktop client for Microsoft Windows servers using the rdp protocol. It is easy to use, fast, and free for anyone to use or modify.

You even have the CoRD code to start from. Improve it. There’s no excuse for the stupid RDC client you have now.