Tech Life from Fresno

This was today's challenge: from a Mac Mini in one room, be able to somehow administer the Powerbook in another room.

Why do such a thing?

The reason is the need to fax pages sourced from Word documents. Most of the work is done from the Mini. However, it does not have any fax capability: no phone, no fax software.

What do we have here?

The Mini is running the latest Snow Leopard 10.6 software. We also have a PowerPC based PowerBook running Panther 10.3. It was never upgraded and is pointless now as 10.6 is Intel only.

The PowerBook does have a fax/modem. A quick test confirmed that capability. To think, I was in the process of selling off the seemingly obsolete PowerBook probably for a couple hundred bucks, at best. New life for the PowerBook.

Options

Without getting into too much detail, options such as Apple Remote Desktop were investigated. One overarching goal was to do this at zero cost. The ARD client is not cheap.

VNC

Their are many flavors of the VNC remote management software, some paid, some free. You need a client (on the Mini) and a server (on the PowerBook). What is VNC? Google it, please.

Which VNC?

Googling "VNC Mac OS X" returns an array of choices and articles. The trick is to tease out the pieces for a client that works with the latest OS X (10.6) and a server that works with the legacy OS X (10.3.9)

The Server for 10.3

The server that works is Vine Server.

The important part is to install version 2.2, not 3.0 which is for 10.5 or later.

If you accidentally install 3.0 server on the 10.3 machine, it will appear to go well until startup. Inspecting the logs reveals all is not well.

The Client for 10.6

The best known Mac VNC client from my research and previous experience is Chicken of the VNC. I'm not sure of the story behind that name.

A little more investigation surfaced this viewer: JollysFastVNC

And with that ... it works!