Damn, my VMWare Fusion demo expires in three days. Looks like I’ll be without Windows on my Mac until I can afford to buy the full version. Despite being the shortest month of the year, this one has proven to be quite expensive for reasons I can’t quite work out. I think hiring the van and moving the sofa did it, I made use of the van to buy lots of large things that I’d have no other chance to move.

Looks like I’m living on beans for March

I’m running VMWare Fusion on my Macbook. In it is an instance of Windows XP. I have a Samba server on my network that is configured to be a domain controller. If I connect my Macbook to the wired network, VMWare Fusion will create a bridged network device and the XP instance gets its own IP address from my DHCP server.

Irritatingly, if I use the Airport wireless connection, the VMWare bridging doesn’t work. I get a message saying /dev/vmnet0 doesn’t exist. After a bit of reading and asking it seems this is because Airport cards don’t support promiscous mode, which is needed for VMWare’s bridging device.

So since the Windows instance then has to use NAT, it gets given an IP address for a tiny private network living in my Mac, which is totally unreachable from the outside world. Also it means any broadcast messages to discover network services won’t go out onto my real network. The main one being Windows saying “hello, is there a domain controller out there?”.

Took me ages to work out that putting the Samba server’s IP address into the WINS part of the XP instance’s network config solved that problem. I can now do a domain logon over a VMWare NAT connection that is using the Airport card in my Mac.

I still haven’t solved the issue where I need the domain controller to be reachable in order to log in at all. Since this is a laptop it’s a bit of a failure if I can’t log into it with the usual profile when not plugged into my network. I don’t want two profiles as this will cause a right mess of duplicate settings, and me having to configure everything twice. I also don’t want to point the local user’s profile at the cached copy of the network user’s local profile. Somehow my work laptop is configured to allow me to log into the domain, even when the PDC isn’t there.

This is nuts!

Here is VMWare Fusion running Windows XP on my Macbook. I’ve got it in “Unity” mode where the Windows desktop is not shown; all Windows apps run seamlessly on the Mac desktop. It’s a bit like how OS/2 Warp could show Windows apps by themselves - only not as crap

Once I have installed all the apps I need and confirmed the VM is working I can back it up to a DVD for safe keeping.

I will be using this VM to run Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Express, so I had better increase the amount of RAM available to the Windows installation. VS 2005 isn’t happy in half a gig of RAM, its dialog designer grinds to a halt.

Aaand I need more ram.

I just tried to boot XP inside VMWare Fusion. It sort of worked in that it booted and Windows moaned about needing to be reactivated (that’s one thing I like about OSX, it doesn’t want to talk to Apple every time you do something to your computer. Not that a Mac can be substantially changed like a PC can). Then it tried to use a gig of ram, causing everything to grind to a halt as a swapfile was filled with useful things like OSX and Finder.

It was like using my old 286 and Windows 3.11 Fortunately the Mac manual tells me what RAM to buy and how to fit it.

Firefox and Google Browser Sync work nicely, and OpenOffice is good enough.