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CraigM_17826's avatar
CraigM_17826
Icon for Altocumulus rankAltocumulus
Feb 10, 2010

MAC support for Remote Desktop

HI all,

 

 

some of our more senior managers have purchased iMACs for working from home. Of course we in IT were not told of this until they tried to connect to our firepass. What sort of support does the Firepass offer for iMACs? So far I have had to disable the av check in the pre-logon sequence for MACs because it fails to detect Sophos AV on the iMAC. Secondly, the RDP client doesn't seem to work with either Safari, Firefox or Chrome. Under windows (their previous PCs at home) this all worked. I suspect that they may have to run a Windows session virtualised (vmware fusion) or bootcamp the iMACs and run Window natively, but I know they are going the scream at me. Anyone else out there using iMACs with the firepass's RDP client succefully?

 

 

What happens is that they clink on the menu link to establish a RDP session with their work PC, a new browser window opens and that's it, nothing else happens. We made sure the target PC was on and we could connect to it duplicating the same steps on the Firepass but using a Windows PC and not a iMAC. The MACs are running snoplepoard.

 

 

The firepass is running 6.1.0 with the following updates

 

HF-129846-1

 

HF-133186-1

 

HF-134290-1

 

Hf-133875-121109-132462-1

 

 

tia

 

 

Craig
BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)
remote access
security
  • Don_Ryles_52501's avatar
    Don_Ryles_52501
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Feb 10, 2010
    Hi Craig,

     

     

    I can't help you on any specifics of the iMAC but I've played around quite a bit getting OSX / RDP access working if that is of any use to you.

     

     

    Obviously under OSX the activeX terminal server access is not an option so it needs to be an RDP session created through an app tunnel.

     

     

    What we've done is to use a pre-logon sequence to check for it being MacOSX and to ensure that the MS RDP client is in /Applications and also the "company" RDP settings file is there. If it is then we give the user a custom webtop containing a link to the app tunnel defined. If no RDP client or settings file then we throw them into another webtop where they can download a package containing the files.

     

     

    Macs don't seem to be able to handle using any other loopback address except 127.0.0.1 and although the app tunnel definition gets assigned a different loopback address the Java setup seems to cope with using the Mac default. You only really see this happening if you have the Java console open.

     

     

    I've attached a screenshot of the app tunnel setup showing the way in which we call our "Company Remote" RDP settings file. For our PCs as they get different custom webtops they gain access to different RDP access arrangements.

     

     

    Incidentally if you have people trying to use Firefox 3.6 then there is a yet to be released hotfix available to get the F5 plug-ins to work. I logged a support call and was given the information.

     

     

    Good luck!

     

     

    Kevin
  • CraigM_17826's avatar
    CraigM_17826
    Icon for Altocumulus rankAltocumulus
    Feb 10, 2010
    G'day Kevin,

     

     

    many many tnanks for your reply. I'll give this a shot. It is much more preferable than having to purchase a Windows license and setting up bootcamp or VMware fusion on the iMAC, though there are some advantages in doing the later.

     

     

    I'll let you know how I go.

     

     

    Regards

     

     

    Craig