Windows on a Mac - Alternatives to Parallels

I recently purchased a MacBook (Core 2 Duo) and bumped the RAM up to 4 gigs (yes, you can do that if you elect to purchase your memory from somewhere other than the Apple store). With all this extra memory and a number of unused licenses for Windows XP, I thought I'd download a trial copy of Parallels and give it a go. Parallels has this nifty little feature called the "transporter" that claims to be able to migrate an entire Windows install from some other machine on your local network and automagically install it on your Mac.

Sounds good, I think. I'll give it a shot.

So, I download and install the software, and run the installer. First, the transporter simply failed, several times over, so I gave up on that, and decided to do a simple clean install. This worked better, for awhile, but hung at "33 minutes left to install" and stayed there. Overnight.

Now, I'm sure this is an odd case, as lots and lots of people are successfully using the software, but I have a fairly low tolerance for software that does not work as advertised the first time (or the third -- I gave it three tries). So, I started looking to see what else was available.

The first thing that came up, of course, was Apple's Bootcamp. It looked promising, and I gave it a try. It works exceptionally well. The disadvantage, of course, is that it's a dual boot solution. You are either on Windows, or on the Mac, and never the twain shall meet. Not exactly what I was looking for. I'll give it this, though; it's fast. Since Bootcamp gives all the hardware directly to Windows, this isn't surprising, but it's arguably the best experience I've ever had with Windows on a laptop. Plus, Apple thoughtfully gives you a driver disk that enables things like the iSight video, the Bluetooth tools, the Airport wireless, and so on. Extremely well done. I just don't want to boot into Windows to do whatever trivial task I have to do that requires it. I want to have Windows run at the same time as Mac OSX.

Then I stumbled across VirtualBox. The site describes it thusly: " innotek VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction; see "innotek" for more about our company."

It's open source, it's free, and it exists for Mac OSX. This is exactly what I was looking for. I'm surprised I had not heard of this product before, as it exists for a lot of different platforms. I downloaded it, installed Windows, and was off to the races.

There are some differences between Parallels and VirtualBox. First, the desktop integration with Parallels is much smoother -- Windows does not live in its own window, as it were. At least that's what it says on their website; I never actually got that far. In VirtualBox, the entire Windows desktop exists by itself. I can copy and paste between Mac and Windows apps, though, so that's not such a big deal. The other thing to note is that it does not support the various resolutions of my monitor (neither the LCD panel that's part of the MacBook, nor the external Compaq 19" widescreen I have hooked up). I get 800x600, or 1024x768, and that's it.

Other than that, it works great. I highly recommend it.

Photos of Wifi Antenna

Someone was asking for photos of the Wifi antenna I built late last year. Apparently the instructions on how the "tupperware" part was used were a bit unclear. I hope a photograph is more helpful.

Build your own NAS device

I believe it is a universal truth that data will always expand to fill all available media -- even if you do nothing with that data. At least, that always seems the case with us.

We have been considering picking up a few Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices for awhile now, so as to increase storage capacity without adding significantly to the space and power consumption in our server facility.

Naturally, this seems to me to be an excellent opportunity to repurpose some old hardware and build my own NAS device.

Before you go too far down this road, though, consider the fact that there are quite a few not-too-expensive NAS devices out there that will work quite well for small office/home office environments. A quick visit to tigerdirect.ca, for instance, shows that you can find a decent sized NAS for well under $500.00 without too much effort. However, serious NAS devices with RAID configurations, redundancy, and 1 TB+ disk space are still very pricey -- so much so that it is probably cheaper to build your own.

I'm going to start the research now, and keep you posted. Here are my goals:

1) Must support Windows/Mac clients
2) Must be fault tolerant (i.e. RAID)
3) Small form factor
4) 1TB+ storage capacity
5) minimum power consumption/heat generation

I'll keep you posted.

Update: This looks like a nice case for the price....

Installing Mono on CentOS 5

There are a variety of ways to install Mono. I elected to use CentOS version 5 as the base operating system, and since this is basically RedHat Enterprise Server with some simple re-branding, it seemed that the best way to do this was via the Yum package manager. Well, this sounds great in theory, but it broke. It turns out that binaries created for CentOS 4 are not exactly compatible with CentOS 5.

Who knew?

So, it's back to an installation from source. Fortunately, this is not terribly difficult. Here is the basic system/software I was installing on:

• CentOS 5
• Dual Core Pentium IV processor (3 GHz)
• Apache 2.0.59
• Mono 1.2.4

Apache is installed from source -- I can't help it. I like to know exactly what's installed, and how it's configured; I still don't trust RPMs.

I elected to install Mono in /opt. The directory didn't exist, so I first created it. I logged in, su-d to root, and created the directory:

[root@luther]# cd /
[root@luther]# mkdir opt

Then I changed to the newly created directory, and downloaded the necessary files. In order to serve .aspx files, we need the mono base, the XSP server, and mod_mono. I got all those files using the trust wget application:

[root@luther]# cd opt
[root@luther]# wget http://go-mono.com/sources/mono/mono-1.2.4.tar.bz2
[root@luther]# wget http://go-mono.com/sources/xsp/xsp-1.2.4.tar.bz2
[root@luther]# wget http://go-mono.com/sources/mod_mono/mod_mono-1.2.4.tar.bz2

Now, upack everything:

[root@luther]# tar jxvmfp *.bz2

Change to the newly created mono-1.2.4 directory, and configure mono. Notice the parameter I passed the configure program; it tells it to install mono in /opt/mono. I then make, and make install the application.

[root@luther]# cd mono-1.2.4
[root@luther]# ./configure --prefix=/opt/mono
[root@luther]# make ; make install

Wait a bit, and voila -- you have the mono base installed. Now let's do the same thing for Xsp. Xsp is the web server for mono -- it handles the compilation and delivery of .aspx files. This is pretty simple as well:

[root@luther]# cd ../xsp-1.2.4
[root@luther]# ./configure --prefix=/opt/mono
[root@luther]# make ; make install

If "configure" or "make" complains about not finding something, try executing this:

[root@luther]# export PATH=/opt/mono/bin:$PATH

Then run the above commands again.

Now, on to mod_mono:

[root@luther]# cd ../mod_mono-1.2.4
[root@luther]# ./configure --prefix=/opt/mono \
--with-mono-prefix=/opt/mono \
--with-apr-config=/usr/local/apache2/bin/apr-config
[root@luther]# make ; make install

When this is done, if you go to /usr/local/apache2/modules (or wherever you told it apache lives) and look at the files there, you should see these: mod_mono.so (a symlink) and mod_mono.so.0.0.0. These are the modules (well, there's only really one -- mod_mono.so is a pointer to mod_mono.so.0.0.0) that apache needs to invoke xsp and deliver .aspx files.

Now we need to configure apache.

Open the apache configuration file with your fvourite editor (we'll use vi):

[root@luther]# vi /usr/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf

Go to the bottom of that file, and append this text:

<IfModule !mod_mono.c>
LoadModule mono_module /usr/local/apache2/modules/mod_mono.so
AddType application/x-asp-net .aspx
AddType application/x-asp-net .asmx
AddType application/x-asp-net .ashx
AddType application/x-asp-net .asax
AddType application/x-asp-net .ascx
AddType application/x-asp-net .soap
AddType application/x-asp-net .rem
AddType application/x-asp-net .axd
AddType application/x-asp-net .cs
AddType application/x-asp-net .config
AddType application/x-asp-net .Config
AddType application/x-asp-net .dll
AddType application/x-asp-net .asp
DirectoryIndex index.aspx
DirectoryIndex Default.aspx
DirectoryIndex default.aspx
</IfModule>

Now, we'll configure a virtual host to serve up the test suite that ships with mono. In the virtual host section of your file, put in something like this:

<VirtualHost 198.xxx.xxx.xxx:80>
DocumentRoot /home/httpd/aspx/html
ServerName aspx.yoursite.com
Alias /demo /opt/mono/lib/xsp/test
MonoApplications "/demo:/opt/mono/lib/xsp/test"
MonoServerPath /opt/mono/lib/mono/1.0/mod-mono-server.exe
<Directory /opt/mono/lib/xps/test>
SetHandler mono
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

Note that you should specify your actual DocumentRoot and IP address to whatever you are using. This tells Apache that everything served under http://aspx.yoursite.com/demo is actually found in /opt/mono/lib/xsp/test, and handled by mono.

Restart apache, and go to http://aspx.yoursite.com/demo/index.aspx

You should see the full mono test suite.

Cool, eh?

Note that with this configuration, I can also put aspx files right in the document root for my virtual host, and they will be handled by mono as well. For example, I put this in the root level of the web server and called it test.aspx:

<html>
<body>
<% Response.Write("Hello World!"); %>
</body>
</html>

And it compiled and worked just fine.

Support .NET on your server without Windows

I've been watching the Mono project for quite some time. My company hosts most of the web applications we build for our clients, and although we don't do a lot of work in .NET (or the classic .asp version), we routinely come across someone who wants to host his or her site with us, but has everything built in ASP or ASP.NET pages.

What a pain.

We actually ran a few Windows based servers for awhile, but spent so much time patching and maintaining them that it turned out to be somewhat less than cost effective. Please note that I am not slamming Microsoft -- this is purely a matter of playing to our strengths, and we really, really like Linux, FreeBSD, and their various variants.

Along comes the Mono Project. This open source system promises a lot:

Mono provides the necessary software to develop and run .NET client and server applications on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Sponsored by Novell (http://www.novell.com), the Mono open source project has an active and enthusiastic contributing community and is positioned to become the leading choice for development of Linux applications.

Well, that looks most encouraging. I am spending a few nights in the server room this week as we upgrade our fibre connection and add some additional redundancy, so think I'll take one of the servers we are replacing and "repurpose" it to try out this software.

I'll keep you posted.