meh.

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