Technology How To

Overview

This technology guide discusses how to use your Mac Computer at Wake Forest University. This is just a short list of suggestions. If you have other ideas or applications please leave comments! Most of the ideas here also work on Linux machines although a much better source of information if you run Linux is available at http://linux.wfu.edu.

Get on to the campus network

There is nothing special that needs to be done to connect to the guest network at WFU. Unfortunately, your Mac is not configured to connect to the student or faculty/staff networks. No problem, just use the guest network. If you need to access certain resources, you can still enter your DEACNET authentication information when prompted.

Install VPN

Leopard

VPN or Virtual Private Network is a technology which allows your computer to create a secure connection to the WFU network from anywhere in the world. In order for VPN to work you must have an internet connection. The Law school maintains a page with complete information about setting up VPN. Using VPN while off campus not only allows you to access licensed WFU resources (like library databases), it also encrypts your network traffic until it reaches WFU.

Snow Leopard

On Snow Leopard (10.6) the Cisco VPN client does not work. The good news is that Snow Leopard has built in VPN support. While you can setup VPN for Snow Leopard (and the iPhone for that matter) using the built-in VPN, we are currently working out getting that documentation setup. More details to come.

Setup entourage email for gmail, wfu

You may be happy with your Gmail interface but just want a way to store email off-line or perhaps you want a client to work from on your computer. In any case, you have several options for configuring email/calendaring to work on your Mac

1. Use Google Gears for off-line access. Google gears allows Google to sync your mail and calendar to your Mac so that you can still see all of your email, google docs, and calendar entries when you are offline. This is a great backup if you like to use the Google interface. Setting up google gears takes a few steps but full information can be found at the Google gears/mail site. First, install Google Gears. You probably need to restart your web-browser. Second, Log in to your mail, go to settings >> labs and enable offline mail. More neat mail tricks can be found on the what’s new site at google. You can also enable offline calendar and docs viewing by searching for the offline link in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Just be sure to get this all setup before you need it!
2. Setup Entourage for viewing. If you don’t like the gmail interface, would prefer a Mac client, or just want to try something different you can follow the instructions at the Law School to setup Entourage
3. You can also use Apple’s built-in mail and calendaring applications to access your email/calendar. Check out these instructions to setup sync with your calendar and these instructions to setup sync with your mail.
4. Unfortunately, the Exchange connector that was delivered with Snow Leopard is not compatible with the WFU version of Exchange

Manage your contacts

You may be using MobileMe to manage your contacts but if you are not, consider using Gmail. Google has some nice features that enable cross-device syncing

Install Library printers

Both the Z. Smith Reynolds and Professional Center Library support printing from Apple computers. Visit http://washington.deacnet.wfu.edu/uniprint and follow the instructions.

Other applications

• Need a word processing / productivity suite? try Open Office
• Need a research management application? try Zotero or Papers. Papers has a neat iPhone application that keeps your bibliographic information syncronized
• Need a way to sync files with your WFU PC? try DropBox or another storage application / service. These services store your data on their services and sometimes will syncronize data to multiple machines. Dropbox automatically synchronizes files to multiple machines and works on OS X, Linux, and Windows.
• Need to run windows applications? Try VirtualBox. VirtualBox allows you to run windows or any other operating system within your preferred OS. Just install VirtualBox, get your valid copy of windows and compute away.