Damn, my VMWare Fusion demo expires in three days. Looks like I’ll be without Windows on my Mac until I can afford to buy the full version. Despite being the shortest month of the year, this one has proven to be quite expensive for reasons I can’t quite work out. I think hiring the van and moving the sofa did it, I made use of the van to buy lots of large things that I’d have no other chance to move.
Looks like I’m living on beans for March 
I’m running VMWare Fusion on my Macbook. In it is an instance of Windows XP. I have a Samba server on my network that is configured to be a domain controller. If I connect my Macbook to the wired network, VMWare Fusion will create a bridged network device and the XP instance gets its own IP address from my DHCP server.
Irritatingly, if I use the Airport wireless connection, the VMWare bridging doesn’t work. I get a message saying /dev/vmnet0 doesn’t exist. After a bit of reading and asking it seems this is because Airport cards don’t support promiscous mode, which is needed for VMWare’s bridging device.
So since the Windows instance then has to use NAT, it gets given an IP address for a tiny private network living in my Mac, which is totally unreachable from the outside world. Also it means any broadcast messages to discover network services won’t go out onto my real network. The main one being Windows saying “hello, is there a domain controller out there?”.
Took me ages to work out that putting the Samba server’s IP address into the WINS part of the XP instance’s network config solved that problem. I can now do a domain logon over a VMWare NAT connection that is using the Airport card in my Mac.
I still haven’t solved the issue where I need the domain controller to be reachable in order to log in at all. Since this is a laptop it’s a bit of a failure if I can’t log into it with the usual profile when not plugged into my network. I don’t want two profiles as this will cause a right mess of duplicate settings, and me having to configure everything twice. I also don’t want to point the local user’s profile at the cached copy of the network user’s local profile. Somehow my work laptop is configured to allow me to log into the domain, even when the PDC isn’t there.
I’ve just finished making my Linux machine work properly again, VMWare Player run XP on it, and then configured my Samba server to be a PDC. I now have roaming profiles and a real Windows Doman for all these Windows instances I have.
In theory it means I have one set of application settings, rather than having to copy data about manually. I know this does actually work because they do it at school – only they have real Windows servers. I just need to work out the offline profile for my Macbook’s Windows instance. Currently I can’t log on unless I log into the machine itself. Somehow my work laptop is able to log onto the domain even when offline.
Further prodding is required, but not now I need to go to bed.
For a while it’s been possible to browse the Google search using a mobile device by pointing a browser at the Google Mobile page. From then it’s the usual Google Search affair to do a web search.
I’ve just noticed, at the bottom of my iGoogle page a link to view it on my mobile phone. Hoping this would be some fantastic RSS/GMail/Calendar iGoogle style page for my phone I followed the necessary steps to add the link to my phone’s browser.
The page loaded quite quickly but wasn’t what I was assuming. Think of it more as a list of Google services, rather than iGoogle. It’s really handy though. You can access all your Google services through it – including Google Docs.
My mobile is an Orange SPV E650 running Windows Mobile 6, and includes the pocket versions of Excel and Word. Using mobile Google I was able to download and edit one of the spreadsheet documents I have stored in my Google docs. There was also an option to view it as HTML. I don’t know if editing can be done though.
I’m fairly sure this is a feature I won’t use that often, I usually have access to a proper PC for most of the time. However there have been the odd situations where being able to call up Google Maps or quickly check my mail (booking a hotel somewhere and forgetting its address, then needing a map to find it, being an example) have been really useful and saved loads of effort.
Or “BDS” as it’s known. They warn new teachers about this, and how some days just seem to fall apart or never get started. Supposedly the trick is to not take it out on the kids. I think I managed this, but it’s not easy when you have some grinning idiot purposefully trying to throw a bag full of spanners into your neatly tuned lesson plan.
I think today I was subconsciously trying to see just how bad my day could go. I didn’t feel great for any specific reason from the minute I woke up. I’m fairly sure several good things happened today, but since I was in a “let’s focus on the crap things happening today” frame of mind they totally skipped me by.
Here’s a short version of today…
So yeah. Tomorrow I now get to waste my break telling kids off. Mind you, if they don’t turn up I’m keeping them behind after school.
Normal service will be resumed shortly, stay tuned.