Wanting to make a near complete switch from desktop to laptop for all of my work, I decided to wait for the faster and relatively cheaper machines to come out.

After buying and swapping a new hard drive, my machine now is a 15″ 2.66 Ghz i7/8gb RAM/7200 rpm (16mb cache) beauty that deals with virtualisation just fine while running every other application that I throw at it.

Suppose you have set up a virtual host for a site called sample.dev. This virtual host allows you to use URLs such as http://sample.dev/about-us/our-team.html

Now you want to be able to use that same virtual host in your virtualised environment (=guest environment). You’re just a few simple steps away from making this work for you.

1. Unique Loopback Address

   To make all this a little easier, I prefer to use a different loopback address than the standard 127.0.0.1. My preferred address is: 10.0.0.101. I’ll explain why I use this address later on.

2. Hosts file: Mac

   Ensure your sample.dev site is configured in your local hosts using the 10.0.0.101 address file as follows:

   
10.0.0.101 sample.dev
10.0.0.101 another-site.dev
10.0.0.101 yet-another-site.dev


   We’ll use the local IP address to bridge the guest and host environments. Please note that you can use any local IP address available to you (ie, not yet in use or assigned).

3. Host file: Windows

   Next, we’ll add the same lines to the host file of the guest environment: locate the file (windows/system32/drivers/etc on XP) and duplicate the Mac host file entries:

   
10.0.0.101 sample.dev
10.0.0.101 another-site.dev
10.0.0.101 yet-another-site.dev


4. Applying the Glue

   Now that we have configured the host(s) files on both the guest and host environments all we have left to do is create the actual bridge for these environments. We do this by adding an ifconfig directive to our system by using launchd or rc.local

   • launchd

     Introduced in OS X 10.4, launchd is a flexible way to start/stop/edit processes. To put it to our use, we’d create a plist entry in /Library/LaunchDemons/

     We do this by opening a terminal window and typing:

     sudo touch /Library/LaunchDemons/ifconfig.plist

     Next, open the file we just created in a text editor and add the following:

     <plist version="1.0">
         <dict>
             <key>Label</key>
                 <string>ifconfig</string>
             <key>ProgramArguments</key>
             <array>
                 <string>/sbin/ifconfig</string>
                 <string>lo0</string>
                 <string>alias</string>
                 <string>10.0.0.101</string>
                 <string>netmask</string>
                 <string>255.255.255.0</string>
             </array>
             <key>RunAtLoad</key>
             <true/>
         </dict>
     </plist>
     

     Finally, save and close the file.

   • rc.local

     The rc.local file runs in the background at system start up. While deprecated and essentially replaced in Leopard by the more flexible launchd, it still can be used to launch processes.

     rc.local can be found at /etc/rc.local. If you’re running a more recent system installation, chances are that you’ll have to create this file as OS X has not created this file by default since version 10.4.

     You can create the file by typing the following in your terminal window:

     sudo touch /etc/rc.local

     Now, open the file we just created in a text editor and add the following:

     ifconfig lo0 inet 10.0.0.101 netmask 255.255.255.0 alias

5. Almost done

   You may need to reboot both the hosted and the hosting environment in order to have these changes come into effect.

   Thanks to Rob Sanheim for his tips on the subject.

Symptoms of a flawed system

My desktop still doesn’t want to boot half of the time: it has a hard time getting past the XP progress bar on a regular boot, or “mup.sys” during a safe mode boot. So I reinstalled Windows on a new hard drive. Cool that works. For the first 5 days or so. Then it’s back to same same: Windows won’t boot, and if it does, it freezes after a few hours. Turn off all power to the system for 10-60 minutes, and it might reboot some of the time.

Looking for a solution

Alright, maybe it’s not getting enough power. Take out the 3rd SATA disk. Now it’s using the same amount of power as it did prior to instability issues. No luck—same trouble. Unless the PSU is issuing dirty power must be something else instead.

Hmmm… better check RAM. Different combinations. No luck.

Upgrade BIOS. No luck.

Just to make sure: re-install Windows, again. No joy past the first few days.

Take out all power cords & re-insert them. No luck.

Set my DRAM timings manually. No luck.

Oh bother. Those shiny new Macs start to look more appealing by the minute…