A Historical Mac Moment

Thursday was a very historical moment ... for the first time in my IT career I inked paperwork to purchase ... a Mac?!

Yep, actually 3 15" Macbook Pro's to be exact ... for Ed, myself, and one of our creative arts dudes.  I didn't slouch the specs ... these puppies are loaded:  2.33GHz Core 2 Duo, 3GB ram, 160GB drive, 6X superdrive, iWorks, Parallels, 3 yr warranty.  We got a good discount, but these are still overpriced IMHO.

What is going on?  Have I been brainwashed?  Have those funny but so ridiculously incorrect Apple commercials gotten to me?  No, I just finally decided it's time for Ed and I to figure out how to best integrate and manage macs via Active Directory.  Another part of this is that we're going to be focusing more on security this year and the times a coming when the "free range" macs (and PC's) on our network will either be under IT controls or not part of the private network.  Oh, and there's still the possibility of an XSAN down the road for video storage, which also might make sense for general Windows network storage as well.  And other reasons of course ... but we can't make any progress on any of these fronts if we don't have equipment to test and learn on ... so I pulled the trigger.

Ed and I will give up our sweet Thinkpad T60p's to other staff really needing laptop upgrades and we'll be stuck with and forced to use the Macbooks at work and home thus the big drives and big ram.  I'm already not looking forward to the paltry batt life of the Mac compared to our dual batt T60's.  And Parallels better work as well as everyone claims or Ed and I will be not happy campers trying to admin a Windows domain :-)

This should be an interesting adventure ... if anyone has suggestions for first time OSX users I'm all ears.  Oh and for those wondering ... no, this does not change our policy on no official mac support nor giving people a choice between mac/PC.  If you absolutely need Final Cut you may have a mac, otherwise it's a PC world baby ;-)

Comments

[Dave Mast]

I'm very interested to hear how this pans out, Jason. I've been thinking about taking this jump, but I don't want to end up with a boat anchor that I can't use to effectively manage our domain. Be sure to keep us updated. :-)

[Brian Marquis]

I use Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server running on Windows 2003 Server within Parallels to do PC Development on my Macbook Pro ( 2 Ghz Core Duo ) with 1 Gb of total RAM and no speed degradation.

Add to that Microsoft RDC, VNC, Apple Remote Desktop, Citrix Client, you can do anything you need to do.

Lots of good Mac stuff here: http://www.bombich.com/
And here: http://www.macosxhints.com/
And: http://www.macwindows.com/index.html

[Ryan Clevenger]

And so it starts.....

You will be a shouting fanboy in about 4 weeks ;)

[Brian Marquis]

Keyboard shortcuts will drive you nuts till you get used to them: A critical one for running in Parallels, the delete key on the Mac book is ^H or the backspace key. Use fn-Delete to get the "DEL" key, as in Ctrl-Alt-fn-Delete....

A full list of shortcuts can be found here:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75459

For Windows guys, I'd also recommend turning on full keyboard access in the Keyboard and Mouse preferences.

[Brian Marquis]

>> if anyone has suggestions for first time OSX users I'm all ears

Counseling??? Just a thought.. gd&r

[Donnie Schexnayder]

I've done some work on integrating Macs into Active Directory. I'm hoping the next version of OS X (Leopard) will make this easier, but I can share some resources if anyone needs them.

[Sam Freiberg]

I admin all our Windows boxes from Mac OS X. Like somebody else said all you really need is RDC for the Mac. Although to be honest I hate Windows as a server and as a desktop so your mileage may vary. I use OS X because it better integrates into *nix environments but all the critical tools are still available if you need them. There's no way I'd run Parallels with less than 2GB of ram though. It's nearly unusable unless I close out everything but essential software on my 1GB Mac Book because it swaps so much. Also, VMware Fusion is in Beta so that might be an alternative to Parallels in the future. We've moved all our servers to ESX servers so Fusion will be great for interoperability among VMware programs.

[Clif Guy]

Dave Winer linked to my post about Mac vs. PC (http://appianway.blogspot.com/2007/02/mac-vs-pc.html), leading to 17 comments. Most people are saying there's no problem getting Macs fixed, but that hasn't been our experience.

[Scott Reichling]

I would recommend Thursby's ADmitMac http://www.thursby.com/products/admitmac.html for integrating the Macs into your Windows AD environment without modifications. We use it here on all of our networked Macs and love it. It supports DFS and allows me to log onto the Mac and connect to my home directory without disabling SMB signing.

I bought a Mac mini to place on my desk in January, but I have not replaced my PC with it. This is a good setup for those who don't want to replace their PC but would like to learn OS X, since the fully loaded mini is only $800 (less if your church is part of the Willow Creek Association) and the standard is $600. I have learned quite a bit about supporting our Macs and how to better integrate them into our Windows environment. Good luck!