Born to explore ;)

I will start by telling you about the landy. I have a 1994 Land Rover Defender which was brought second hand about 1 year ago and I have trying to get it running sweet ever since.

The things that I would like to do are:

• Give it a bit of sound proofing without being too pretty
• Track down the reason for a strange lurching when getting off then on the “gass” again.
• Remove the slight clunking that runs through the drive train when not being gentle with the clutch.
• Upgrate the diffs to some soft of lockers

I have been using Land Rover Owner(AULRO) quite a bit for finding my information, or at the very least a starting point for my investigation. I will not include answers to these posts in this one to make it easier for people to find what they are after, so have a look at the answers to these posts by clicking the links in the dotpoints

Recently I was asked to set up and network using OSX Server. This sounded like a fun challange considering I have never administered, and barely used mac’s before .

Just to clear up the situation, the mac is file serving the quicken data file. The clients are using pc’s and the client install for Quickbooks to connect to the mac share.

Anyway, I will try to stick to the topic! I wanted to talk about something which appeared yesterday, when the Quickbooks Premier install/file share sitting on the mac server started to give the customer headaches. It started with the Quickbooks clients locking up and not allowing the users to log. Well, I went about checking the perms on the data file and access rights on the clients but could find nothing wrong. So, I started googling, then discovered that Quickbooks uses the client “service” to manage user connections. This meant that I would have to install Quickbooks on the mac server .. At first I thought that was bullshit/sucked but then I had the idea to try “VmWare Fusion”.

What I ended up doing was installing vmware fusion on the server and a fully patched install of xpsp2. It was set up in bridged mode to allow the pc’s in the workgroup to see shares and connect to it via ip/name. Then I just preceded to move the quickbooks data files to the vmware instance of xp and created sim links on the server, so the clients would be transparently redirected to the new vmware files. Then somthing amazing happened.. it actually worked…weee

Well, now that has enlightened me to other prospects that you could use this same methodology on any non windows server for any software. The only downside would be a little performance lag, but that is better than not working at all