Breaking new ground : An UBER Tool for the Mac

A few months ago I bought my first Mac. I had been a hardcore Windows workstation kind of guy. And being a C# coder in the late hours of the night it was all I needed. But, after seeing my former teammates (vSpecs) using their sexy Mac Books I finally made the switch. I picked up a Mac Book Air and from the minute I started using it, fell in love with everything about it.

Because of this switch I have come to learn the things that the Mac (and Lion) do really well with some things while Windows does better with others. For almost all of my UBER projects I use my beefy Windows workstation running VMware Workstation to setup my lab/dev environments.

But, recently I started trying to move over to my Mac and using VMware Fusion to build lab virtual machines for developing. And to my surprise I found that things in the Fusion world aren’t quite the same as for Workstation. Namely, the networking options are rather limited. By default you only get the choices of three networks 1) DHCP w/ NAT  2) DHCP and 3) Bridging to a physical interface. For me that meant that I couldn’t get a network without DHCP (important if you are testing it) or create multiple isolated networks like I could on Workstation.

So I went digging and found that at one point someone has written some slick scripts to allow for custom multi-network setup but it stopped being updated after Fusion 2. I also found that VMware has some KB articles on how to hack your way to adding networks. But neither was very easy to do or dealt with modifying the VM’s well.

So I decided to fill this gap myself. Over the Christmas holiday I worked furiously to make this and now I am proud to present the next UBER release and my first project in the Manic Innovation Challenge: UBER Network Fuser (UNF)

UNF is a native Mac OSX application supported on Snow Leopard and Lion that allows you to add additional networks to VMware Fusion, customize their settings, and easily change network selection for any Fusion VM’s. I designed it to be simple to use and be similiar to how VMware Workstation network editor works.

Here is the full feature list:

1. Allows up to 10 additional custom networks (total of 12)
2. You can enable/disable DHCP, NAT, virtual host adaptor on any network
3. Protects and provides rollback of default Fusion settings
4. Allows dynamic changes of network membership with Fusion VM’s
5. You may alias networks with custom names (even Workstation doesn’t do this)
6. Tested and confirmed that VLAN tagging works as expected within private networks
7. Saves configuration per user (names, paths, etc)
8. Integrates with Apple’s Security framework for elevated privileges when needed

I created a video to demonstrate how it works below:

And to download (free as always) use the link below:

Download UBER Network Fuser 1.0 – DMG for Snow Leopard & Lion (Updated link to new 1.701 version)

This is my first release in the Manic Innovation Challenge. It is written in Objective C & C and uses the Cocoa and Security frameworks. Challenge-wise it was definitely an experience learning and writing an app in Objective C in  few weeks. But, it was crazy fun and I have all kinds of cool ideas for the Mac now.

Also, this marks post #100 for me in the 2.3 years I have been running Nickapedia.com. Being that it is also my birthday I am considering today a good day.

As always please test and play with it and let me know with some comments below.

.nick