For my Oracle based lab configurations i use virtualization software on my Mac. I have used VMWare Fusion in the past, currently use Parallels Desktop and am considering to switch to Oracle Virtualbox in the near future. Since we have multiple Macs in our household an old mini running OS X server with a big external harddisk (WD MyBook Studio) serves as a Time Machine backup server. Time Machine which is part of OS X is a perfect tool for regular backups but for two reasons really useless for making backups of Virtual Machines. First, most of my virtual machines have virtual disks which are 10GB to 40GB in size. Most of them are not split in 2GB files, therefore starting a VM will immediately result in a new Time Machine backup of over 40GB if these virtual machines are not excluded from the backup. Secondly, for most virtualization software the VM consists of multiple configuration, disk and memory files. All these files are bundled in a Package, inconsistency between one or more of these files makes the whole VM corrupt, and since backing up all files of one VM can take a substantial amount of time the chance that you only have a partial backup of your VM using Time Machine is substantial. Therefore i excluded all my VirtualMachines from Time Machine and rely on RSync to sync my VMs to a destination folder on another Mac. In my case this is the same OS X server i use for the Time Machine backups, but you can use any other Mac with File Sharing enabled. I prefer to use the same account to access both Macs, but you could backup your VMs on your source machine under account 'a' to a folder owned by account 'b' on a destination machine. It takes a few simple steps to sync your VMs easely and much faster.

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I recently upgraded my OS X Server on 10.7 to 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and was left with a not so Mac feeling. In short, a lot of the functionality working perfectly under 10.7 now just stopped working. After a lot of frustrating hours i decided to replace most of the standard OS X functionality by Kerio Connect. Kerio Connect installed in minutes and was easy to configure due to its friendly administrative interface, so i was back online! On OS X i used fetchmail to download my e-mail from different POP and IMAP servers. Kerio disappointingly only supports POP3 downloads and is bearing IMAP downloads. Since i still wanted to download mail from a Exchange 2010 IMAP server using SSL i found out how to use fetchmail to download mail from an Exchange 2010 server and forward it to the Kerio Connect server.

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How to install the source code from Bruce Eckels book the “Annotated Solution Guide for Thinking in Java 4th edition” on OS X.

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Tags: Java