MacBook Surprises and Non-Surprises

So before I decided (well after agonizing about it for a couple of weeks) to get MacBook I did a lot of reading and YouTube viewing so I didn't go into the purchase blindly.

But what surprised me...
- 1 GB has been usable. Having an XP or OpenBSD VM in VMWare Fusion has been decent. Haven't tried a lot of VM's but so far so good.
- Bootcamp doesn't work if you don't have a single partition. I made the mistake of creating a 2nd 20GB partition that I'd figure I'd put Ubuntu on, but no dice.
- When I did a clean install of the OS it was harder to do a stripped down (without Office/iLife Demos, etc.) than I thought. And running OSX from a LiveDVD is awful. Install took really long.
- Temperature has been no worse than my 12" PowerBook G4.
- The MagSafe power adapters are actually harder to pull out than I would have expected.
- The size is about perfect and the black matte finish feels more like a PowerBook than an iBook.
- Since the MacBook Pro 15" is so thin (and wide) I thought the MacBook's feel more durable despite the lack of the aluminum case.

What didn't surprise me...
- The keyboard is ok. Not great, just different.
- The fan is a little noisy at times.
- Yes, the case smudges pretty easily.

Getting around lame networking in VMWare Fusion

NOTE: Host only network now works in VMWare Fusion Beta 3

So I finally broke down and bought an Intel Mac on Friday (a black MacBook for what it is worth) largely because the lack of decent virtualization (and the small screen) on my 12" PowerBook G4. So the Parallels key request email bot (or whatever) is down so no Parallels Desktop yet, so I'm stuck with the VMWare Fusion Beta, which is a bit rough around the edges.

Among other things, I can't seem to figure out. Basically there are no virtual interfaces created on the host, although guest machines can use NAT and Bridged Mode. Host only isn't available through the GUI.

But the good new if you are using NAT within the guest machine you can connect to the host. So it took me a little while, but this means you can use SSH forwarding to

So within a pristine OpenBSD 4.0 Box:

# netstat -an | grep 22
tcp        0      0  172.16.71.130.43556    172.16.71.2.22         ESTABLISHED
tcp        0      0  *.22                   *.*                    LISTEN
udp        0      0  172.16.71.130.37986    84.16.227.163.123
udp        0      0  172.16.71.130.10064    84.16.227.207.123
tcp6       0     48  ::1.22                 ::1.13934              ESTABLISHED
tcp6       0      0  ::1.13934              ::1.22                 ESTABLISHED
tcp6       0      0  ::1.22                 ::1.22840              ESTABLISHED
tcp6       0      0  ::1.22840              ::1.22                 ESTABLISHED
tcp6       0      0  *.22                   *.*                    LISTENABLISHED

Now on my MacBook:

franz-macbook:~ mdfranz$ netstat -an | grep 22
tcp4       0      0  127.0.0.1.2222         127.0.0.1.50377        ESTABLISHED
tcp4       0      0  127.0.0.1.50377        127.0.0.1.2222         ESTABLISHED
tcp4       0      0  127.0.0.1.2222         127.0.0.1.50267        ESTABLISHED
tcp4       0      0  127.0.0.1.50267        127.0.0.1.2222         ESTABLISHED
tcp4       0      0  127.0.0.1.2222         *.*                    LISTEN
tcp6       0      0  ::1.2222               *.*                    LISTEN
tcp4       0      0  127.0.0.1.22           127.0.0.1.50265        ESTABLISHED
tcp4       0      0  127.0.0.1.50265        127.0.0.1.22           ESTABLISHED
tcp4       0      0  *.22                   *.*                    LISTEN
tcp6       0      0  *.22                   *.*                    LISTEN       ESTABLISHED

So it's interesting the connection from source port 43566 is never seen on the MacBook. And of course there are no interfaces on the 172.16.71.0/24 network or routes. So apparently there is some sort of port forwarding/TCP proxying or something going on behind the scenes.

But if you can connect to the host that means the host can connect back to you. The easiest way I thought of was to use remote SSH forwarding. I assume there may be some other ways to do this as well.

On the guest machine (OpenBSD 4.0)

# ssh -v  -R :2222:localhost:22 mdfranz@172.16.71.2

Where 172.16.71.2 is the addr I can get to my Mac.

Then on my MacBook

franz-macbook:~ mdfranz$ ssh -v root@127.0.0.1 -p 2222

A bit of a hack but it works.