I might have a slight obsession with elegant networking. I have quite a few different chunks of hardware running a variety of systems, and they don’t entirely play nice. I decided to concentrate my “work” efforts onto one machine, a somewhat aging MacBook Pro, and I wouldn’t mind better behaving network shares and services. Some number of years ago, I toyed around with some very early, simple zeroconf/Bonjour services, but they were quite crude.

I love progress. I somehow missed all of the development done to Avahi, because it now does exactly what I want. One search for this handy forum post later, and I have each machine’s services clustered under one broadcast and displaying nicely in all of my mac apps.

+ eth0 IPv4 greybeard                                     FTP File Transfer    local

+ eth0 IPv4 greybeard                                     Microsoft Windows Network local

+ eth0 IPv4 greybeard                                     SSH Remote Terminal  local

+ eth0 IPv4 greybeard                                     SFTP File Transfer   local

+ eth0 IPv4 greybeard                                     Web Site             local

<3

Not going to dick around with trying to do a networked Time Machine backup, since I’ve read that there’s still issues regarding what happens when the share fills up. Got my lil’ 500gb portable, so no need.

Is it all necessary? Not a bit. Neither is a Mac. Might as well make it pretty.

Hello, Pussycat.

VNC. Sounds like an old wartime enemy. Well, I’ve got orange pajamas, and I don’t want to get up to fuss with my media player in between episodes of Stargate. Sure, if I had a real media center setup, I could zap the remote and select stuff from the comfort of my armchair. In time, I’ll get a server to stream stuff to my xbox, and use the fancy remote for it.

Since I’m not there yet (and I’m looking at you, ubuntu, we’ll talk later) I’ve got a Windows 7 RC machine doing some video mirroring to my television. The controls for it are a mere few feet away, but I’ll be buggered if I’m going to get up every time I want to alter the playlist. This is America, and I have my rights.

I want to control it from my laptop running MacOS 10.5. Solution? VNC. Not perfect, but it’ll do. TightVNC server installed on the media lodge. Went with my old favorite, Chicken of the VNC for the laptop. Point of trouble: either I’m dense (likely) or I couldn’t get CotV to scale the picture. Not great performance anyhow.

RonDiaz points me to something he had forgotten about, but timely remembered:

Connect to Server (Apple-K) and load up vnc://hostname

Bask in glory and simplicity

MacOS has a VNC client built-in, and it’s pretty decent to boot. Also, screen scaled by default. Win. While I’m not exactly concerned with the speediest of screen updates, it’s not bad. I just want to hit the controls, since I can see what I’m doing on the telly.

I did get as far as downloading JollysFastVNC, but I haven’t gotten around to trying it yet. This’ll do.