In this lesson, I want to talk about TASC servers, and before I do that, I do want to talk a little
bit about some options for running the Apple remote desktop without having to configure a machine to
be a test server for you on.
One of the more common things I've seen and works pretty well is to set up a Mac server or set up a
Mac client with a static IP address on the network at a particular campus or office building or whatever
the situation calls for.
And you'd simply do that by going to System Preferences Network.
Go to advanced.
TCP, IP, and then here you can manually identify manually set your IP address here, so if you have
a static IP, set your machine, you know that you can then add that machine to an Apple remote desktop
session or you screen sharing built into OS 10 from a client machine to get to that Mac server or Mac
client wherever and wherever you happen to be, and then be able to launch remote desktop.
Now, if you're going to use remote desktop to use to remote into a machine that will also be using
remote desktop, there is one very important setting you need to set.
Otherwise you can get into this catch twenty two where you may not be able to actually launch remote
desktop on that remote machine through with remote desktop sharing turned on.
So you need to do there is going to preferences on remote desktop, go to security and then check this
box, allow control of this computer when this application is running.
If you have that turned on, that will allow you to remote a computer with remote desktop and then launch
remote desktop on that remote computer and interact with it.
Let's say you decide, instead of doing that, you'd rather just have one client on the network set
up to be your remote desktop task server.
I can figure this, you have to do a couple of things first, you have to go into and I would recommend
setting up that static IP address on whatever machine that's going to be.
So this should be ideally a computer like in the data closet that no one uses that's there for maybe
maybe it serves some other functions, runs other services.
But it should primarily be something that people aren't using day in and day out for regular work.
So don't have it be your boss's laptop or something like that.
It should be a desktop machine, preferably hard wired, preferably with a static IP address that.
Two, it should have remote management turned off, so if you remember when we were setting up the client,
we went into sharing and we had remote management turned on.
You're going to want to make sure that's turned off on the machine.
That is going to be your test server.
Now, the reason for that is that I have found, at least in Mojave, having that turned on or having
the remote desktop application running when you're trying to connect to it as a test server causes remote
desktop to crash.
So your results may vary.
I've been doing that.
Just be safe.
Two or three, rather, you go into system preferences on the machine that will be your task server
after you've installed remote desktop, launch it.
Go in to preferences, go to task server, and it'll have this automatically turned on, but you want
to check the box for allow remote connections to the server.
Once you've done that, you basically set it up as a test server and then what you can do.
Is close out a remote desktop, and now it'll run as a service in the background, if you have a remote
desktop running, if you have remote management turned on in system preferences, when you go to any
other machine running remote desktop and you want to connect it to the test server, you will have a
problem because the application will repeatedly crash, at least in Mojave.
Now that I've set up the task server to function as a remote desktop server, I do need to go to one
of my other remote desktop machines and here I am back on my administration machine and I need to go
ahead and set this one up to use that new test server that I just configured.
So to do that, I just launched a remote desktop, as I have here, and I go up to the system or to
the preferences for remote desktop and I go to the test server tab.
And instead of by default using the test server on this computer, I'm going to choose to use a remote
task server.
And that's where I can put in the IP address of that remote server.
And select.
And it'll validate the test server, and once it does that, I will be able to schedule jobs and the
test server will handle scheduling those jobs instead.