A bit late on this but wanted to just mention another way to remotely control another PC from the Mac (sort of). I help my Dad by using MSN Messenger in a Parallels VM. This requires that both parties have a Messenger account obviously. Usually, we’ll start with a Skype call and he’ll ask some question or have some problem where we determine it’s easier for me to just show him how to fix rather than describe. So I have him login to Messenger while I start my Parallels VM. Once I’m in Windows, I start Messenger and we start a text chat. Then I have him right-click me in Messenger and choose “Ask for remote Assistance”. Messenger goes through a bit of handshaking and permission dialogs and after a bit, I have his desktop on my screen. I can take over control if needed as well. Seems to work pretty well.

Tom

Just wanted to comment on Remote PC Access to support family members. I’ve used TeamViewer for this and am very impressed with it. It works across firewalls and no need to worry about IP addresses etc., Good when we are helping my non-technical family members.

It’s free for personal use. And no installation necessary. And they’ve recently released a version for the Mac.

http://www.teamviewer.com/index.aspx

…it may be useful for you too – for testing web pages.

great show! – i have been a fan since the beginning!

The performance is really ok even on relatively slow internet connection. what you need to do is install a little plugin on the target machine (yes, it is good to do it when you visit your family member).

if you check the website you will also find the phone version. i loaded it on my Nokia E50, but the screen was undreadable. I wonder how would it look like on the iPhone (which we’re not getting any time soon here, in Poland, unfortunately :-( )

“…you are now and admin, you can now do: ‘sudo nano /edit/hosts’. You will…”

(note sudo in front of nano)

“…you are now and admin, you can now do: ‘sudo nano /edit/hosts’. You will…”

(note sudo in front of nano)

Adding somene to the sudoers file is the unix-level-equivalent of making them an administrator. I’ll bet the’res more to the administrator-accounts in the higher levels of the OS, but I’m sure that at least one of the things that happens when you add an administration account in the accounts-preference panel is that the account is put in the sudoers file.

What you should do to get access to edit /etc/hosts is the unix-level-equivalent of the “please provide an administrator user name and password”-dialog. Which is, as Paul points out above: “su account” where ‘account’ should be replaced by the short name of an administrators account.

This will make you an administrator for that shell session (hence not affecting other running applications – keeping you secure) Since the administrators account is in sudoers, and you are now a n admin, you can now do: “nano /etc/hosts”. You will need to provide the admin-account password a second time. (the first time to get into the admin account, the second time to use the sudo command).

A trick which is sometimes useful (although generally frowned upon) when you need to do several operations which may require root access and you don’t want to be bothered typing “sudo” in front of everything is:

1) Get into an administrations account: “su admin”. Enter administration password
2) Type “sudo su”, enter administration password again.
3) Now you are logged in as the root user, with full system privileges – no need for sudo.
4) AS SOON AS YOU’RE DONE, type “exit ” once to get from root back to the admin account, and then “exit ” again to get back to your normal account.

Go to http://www.instructables.com/id/Neatly-wrap-cords-without-ties-or-tangles/ to see how to wrap earbud cords without worrying about tangling, and even better without carrying around a funny-looking blue guy in your pocket. I’ve been using this method with my iPod earbuds for the past two years with no problems.

Keep up the great work!

If you need to do tasks as an administrator from the Terminal, just log in using (assuming the administrator account is “admin”):
su – admin

Then you can use the sudo command as admin.

Regarding automatically dismounting drives/external servers. For the past week or so I’ve been using SleepWatcher from http://www.bernhard-baehr.de/ – install this and its StartupItem, create a script to dismount Volumes (or any other action you want to do on sleep) in a file called .sleep and another script for waking up in .wakeup both in your home directory.

It works pretty well. I found it via – http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080329201951648