Finally.
The Mac made its way to my office. It might not be the biggest breakthrough, as I am the only one out of 80 people to use one for actual work, but hey, it’s a start.
It took a while, and a change of position in our company, but it’s now sitting proudly on my desk : Mac mini 1.25 Ghz, 512MB of RAM, with Bluetooth. Got lucky, my unit came equipped with a Seagate 5400 RPM drive.
I had fears that the rather odd combination of software and network architecture of our office would give me headaches, but pleasantly, no.

We’re a shipping company. Shipping as in “vessels”… you know, the big floating things. It might look like an ancient way of transporting things to some people, but it’s still booming, in many different areas, thanks to new types of energy resources (such as LNG), and of course because of China’s ever expanding market.

However, one thing that remains ancient about this industry is the people, (no offense to fellow shipping people) and thus the communication habits. Of course we are all using e-mail now, thank God, but until very recently, TELEX and COMTEXT were very “popular”. And therefore, the state of the programs themselves is pretty much the same; we’re still using ancient 16bits Windows apps for handling emails/fax, ships database, contact details…

And then finally, the management was convinced that we needed something a bit more “up to date”. The decision was rushed, and we ended up with brand new machines with Windows XP, running the same old programs. What a difference…

Then came the problem of being able to check all this stuff from outside. To that, I decided to take an old machine, install a simple Linux distro on it and run a VPN server. It worked quite alright actually ! But of course, the powers that be decided that having “something Linux” was “dangerous” (sic) and that I was a “hacker” for installing something that finally worked.
So they bought a Citrix Metaframe solution, with brand new Windows 2003 servers, the whole shebang. So our system finally became platform agnostic, since there are Citrix clients for many platforms. I will not debate whether our current solution is good or not, that is not my point. But it finally made it possible for me to get a Mac in the office.

And it works. From within our LAN, I log into our AD with a little help from AdmitMac, connect to our Canon printers and faxes via the appropriate drivers (although the Canon drivers for the networked fax machines do not use the systemwide Address Book.app, but their own fax number database… だめ！) and I use our legacy apps through Citrix OS X client.

Things are not as rosy when I try to login from outside. See, our system has a Citrix webpage that we access from outside; it comes with goodies such as root certificate, SSL, etc. With Safari, I can log in fine to the webpage, but as soon as I click on the icon of one of our shared apps, the Java Citrix applet seems to fail and I get a freaking spinning beachball of death, forcing me to kill -9 Safari.

I found one way that lets me access the apps, though :
Use FireFox or any other non-Safari browser. The Citrix server will complain about you not using the Mac OS 9 Citrix client, but will let you authenticate fine. then everytime you click on an application icon, it will download a small launcher type file, that you can use with the standalone Citrix client, and it works.

So, all in all, my experience so far is pretty rewarding : I can use our legacy apps while enjoying OS X. Every day I seem to stumble across a new stupid little annoyance, especially from Canon’s printer and fax drivers (全然面白くない) or OS X 10.3 dismal native Active Directory support. I’m quite keen on seeing how well Tiger will improve on the “being a good Windows citizen” front, but hey, at least I have a Mac at work too now, and that’s just plain cool :)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005 at 07:12 CET and is filed under Apple talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.