MAC questions

[Gilligan]

That is true.

Keep your machine WORK related.

Put a virtual machine on your computer and only surf through that.  Then it will only foul up the virtual system and leave the "real" windows in tact.

Crazy, but it would work.

[shirtz]

I too got fed up with all of thr pc issues and bought an imac. My intentions were to start to learn the mac side but that has not been the case. I installed VM fusion and windows XP pro and have not looked back. We run accurip, a brother GT541, epson 1400, scanner and basically everthing we need.

 

[Gilligan]

I too got fed up with all of thr pc issues and bought an imac. My intentions were to start to learn the mac side but that has not been the case. I installed VM fusion and windows XP pro and have not looked back. We run accurip, a brother GT541, epson 1400, scanner and basically everthing we need.

Wow, that's an expensive "pc". LOL

[inkbrigade]

My day job is working for a large school district here in Oregon. I manage about 1500 macs 1500 PCs, and about 2000 Linux  machines.

So I have a lot of experience with all of these platforms.

At inkbrigade we use virtual machines extensively.

We have a Linux server which holds about five Windows virtual machines.

One Windows virtual machine just runs fast manager and QuickBooks.

One Windows virtual machine just runs accurip.

One connects to our plotter et cetera.

Each Windows virtual machine has a firewall configured on it and basically has no reason to be connected to the Internet.
Each virtual machine takes a snapshot of itself daily, so that way if it does get messed up we are able to roll back to a previously known good working snapshot.

This way if the machine gets infected with a virus or malware, or a software update goes wrong, or windows just decides to eat itself like it loves to do, we can just roll back to a previous snapshot.

We also use the drop box service and store our QuickBooks and fast manager data in there.

With dropbox every time a file is changed it is uploaded to dropbox. This way if I have to roll back to a snapshot I do not lose the data that has changed since the last time the snapshot was taken.

So that's our inkbrigade set up, I don't know that installing Linux and doing this is the right thing for you, even Linux has gotten easier to use it still not a no-brainer to set up.

People complain that Macintoshes are expensive, but what's more expensive to me is downtime in the shop.

Macs are not hard to learn, file print, file save, copy and paste, all that sort of stuff works the same on Macintosh or windows.

With that said me, my wife and our sales person all use Macintoshes for our client computers.

I can't remember the last time that A MacIntosh ate itself software issues. Not to mention that viruses and spyware are pretty much a non-issue on Macs.

So my advice to you would be to do basically what our set up is. Except instead of running on a Linux server run the virtual machines on your Macintosh.

Please forgive any weird spelling issues as I am using speech to text software

Feel free to email me directly with any server or Macintosh questions. Jamie@inkbrigade.com

[Gilligan]

Awesome setup Ink!

I run my virtual machines similarly.  I run a linux server (headless, no X) and then run VBox on it.  I'd rather run Xen but I have been putting off the upgrade that would allow that.

It has had it's glitches but very simple fixes as you have described.

I love emulation/virtualization... it makes TONS of sense in lots of cases.  My method though isn't really for the faint at heart since it's all driven by command line stuff... they do make GUI versions, I just don't use them so it's really hard for me to give real world examples.

[inkbrigade]

Hey Gilligan,
That sounds awesome!

 nice to see there's another *nix nerd here

I use virtual box on my Mac because it's free and it seems to work okay.
On the Linux machine I use KVM.
Seems like a lot of people are bailing on Xen for some reason, I think some people have their panties in a bunch ever since Citrix got involved with it

KVM has been great and is built-in to the Linux kernel, failover and most of the goodies of VMware esx set up would have.

[Gilligan]

Hmm... guess I need to do some more research.  It has been a while since I first dug into it and saw how cool Xen was over something like VBox.  I like the idea of the "base" being the "host" vs having an OS running and the host just running on it like any other service.

It took me months to stop getting all giddy when firing up a GUI that was running in a non-GUI (Headless) server.  I still think it's cool as hell, I just don't get overly excited any longer. HAHA!

[inkman996]

OK guys I really thank everyone for their input even the extreme nerd related stuff! We made a decision i am taking it from what I have read here no matter what i run off a PC currently there will be a solution to also do it on a MAC. We are heading to the apple store today or tomorrow to order one and then i will find VM to install set up win7 and go from there.

Now a couple more questions.

How do you handle files from one OS to another? for instance if I am creating graphics in Illy on MAC how do I get that over to the win7 for out put?

Also someone was mention taking snap shots of the virtual windows what would i need to do that?

One last thing, i use several externals for back ups and storage will i also be able to implement them for the MAC?

TIA

[Denis Kolar]

Files from one system to another.
VM Fusion will be basically another window on your Mac. You will just grab the file from desktop and just drag-and-drop to the VM window or Windows desktop.

As far as the external HD, it should not be a problem. I believe, just hook them up and you should be good to go.

BTW, I'm getting new iMac one next month too.

[Gilligan]

Yeah, that sounds like the ticket with the drag and drop.

I don't "host" my VM session locally but you have networking capabilities just like any other... so I just have networked storage that I can get to from both sides and store my files there.

Depending on how you implement them, if they are scheduled back ups I'm certain there is a solution, probably built in like windows.  If you are doing it manually then like Dennis said, it will likely be seamless.

[Sbrem]

If you plug an external HD into an iMac, it should just recognize it and you're good to go. If not, there is something wrong with the HD, at least in my experience. I just had to get a new one at home as my 7 year old one had it's power supply go. I got the new one, took the drive out of the old one, hooked it up to an old external PS I had, and it was instantly recognized by the new iMac. Pretty easy stuff.

Steve

[Gilligan]

If you plug an external HD into an iMac, it should just recognize it and you're good to go. If not, there is something wrong with the HD, at least in my experience. I just had to get a new one at home as my 7 year old one had it's power supply go. I got the new one, took the drive out of the old one, hooked it up to an old external PS I had, and it was instantly recognized by the new iMac. Pretty easy stuff.

Steve

Two things... does OS X recognize NTFS?  I'm sure his hard drives are formatted NTFS currently... not sure if that will present a problem.  I know MS never released the info on NTFS, the linux community reverse engineered it (and then, in my opinion, made it better) and now it supports it.  Being *nix based I'm sure there is an NTFS package just like there is a HPFS driver for windows but it might not support it out the box... I could be wrong.  Secondly, I wasn't sure if he was asking about accessing the external HD's from his virtual environment... that was the part I was unsure of.

[Dottonedan]

My assumption was that a 1tb drive would be interchangeable. Most sales people thought the same thing. So, I got home, loaded it on the mac, copied everything over and opened up on the PC.  Nothing. It wanted me to re-format the drive. it said it was unrecognizable.  My PC would not recognize it. It didn't say anything about it on the BOX. I took it back. (got it at Staples).


I then found a more expensive one that said it was usable on both MAC and PC but did not say if you could use them on both. I thought maybe it was one or the other...but not both.


When I got my drive home,  I was afraid nothing would show up on my PC if I just formatted the drive for a MAC only, so I divided it up into partitions. I set one for a MAC and one for PC.


Macs recognize the PC drives easily enough. No prob. I can view/copy save/ files from my Mac partition and I can view my PC partition at the same time  (on a mac).


When I plug it into the PC, the PC does not show the MAC partition (AT ALL).


So now, I have 300 gb of space on my 1tb drive that sits empty since I can't bring them over to my PC. I guess I could now copy everything from my 1tb drive over to the new 2tb rive....and reformat the old one for just PC...that way my mac will read all of it. again, danged PC's.

[Gilligan]

Dan, as I mentioned above (probably while you were typing), there is a driver for PC's that lets you read the Mac file format.

The one file format that is "universal" is Fat32... the problem is you can't have files over 4gig in size.  I have many files that are larger than that in my world so that doesn't work for me.  NTFS is a great file system but Linux doesn't support it straight out the box (well, not read/write) but is extremely easy to in Linux.  Not sure how it works on OS X.

[inkman996]

All our externals are NTFS which is what i was eluding to being an issue. I figured the virtual win willhave no issue but would want to be able to access the files on there if i am using illy from the MAC side. I figured MAC OS cannot recognize NTFS or any thing placed in it.

I know what you are thinking why bother with the files in MAC since i am a corel user and will run corel in the windows enviroment but i plan on ditching Corel as soon as practical. I hate Corel now more so than ever and even more with the latest changes.