Marc Palmer

Steve Jobs rocks. He’s rocked Apple into a company I can buy killer computers and an OS from. He’s a great show man, a consummate CEO.

Now, please let him fade away gracefully Apple. Perhaps this is happening, what with him not giving the Macworld Expo talk.

Doubts about his health are too damaging to the company and it is really obvious actually that the whole management team at Apple is really on the ball – but this is not widely understood and as a result Apple’s stocks are suffering at every twist and turn of public appearances (separately from the general market problems).

People need to see – gradually, and this seems to be Apple’s plan – that life goes on without Steve and great stuff continues to come from Apple. After all he’s got them to a pretty amazing place. Killer proprietary OS, killer phones, computers people actually want to own as objects, not just as tools.

I hope you’re well Steve.

At one of my clients I need to run a VMWare VM on my Apple MacBook.

After much pain and messing around, the problems I had with getting the network of the guest O/S working were related to VMWare and the guest O/S’s fixed IP address.

Even if you set VMWare to NAT mode, it will not notice the fixed IP that the guest O/S is using. What you have to do is change the DHCP and NAT settings of DHCP to use the correct subnet you want, and the correct IP address. You do this by changing the “/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/vmnet8/dhcpd.conf” and “/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/vmnet8/nat.conf” files, so that there is a single IP address in the DHCP range (end of range MUST be start+1).

You then ALSO have to edit the file “/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/locations”  to change the value of – wait for it – VMNET_HOSTONLY_HOSTADDR to the IP subnet you want the “static” IP to be on.

This last step took me a long time to work out, not least because the variable name makes no sense with using NAT mode.