Mac-to-PC Notifications

[Brian Dunnington]

GfW already allows forwarding to Mac, but what about going the other
way? Here is a small utility to help solve that problem.

http://blog.growlforwindows.com/2009/12/mac-to-pc-notifications.html

[PzyCotix]

Very very nice work. I am impressed at your skils and dedication to
this:)

Ian

On Dec 4, 12:10 am, Brian Dunnington <briandunning...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Tintin]

Doesnt seem to be working here. I know i can do communication with my
2 computers (using synergy) but whe the Impersonator is running i
doesnt see it in Growl/Forward settings

Any idea?

[Paul Traylor]

Make sure you have bonjour installed. I was missing that on my test VM.

http://www.apple.com/support/bonjour/

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Paul Traylor

[Tintin]

it works now thanks.

But in your first post you say it already works the other way around.
How? I thought growl didnt support GNTP yet?

Thanks

[Tintin]

Ok i found it in the doc, but after setting everything i dont see
notification on my mac. Any idea on how i can see if at least udp
messages arrive on my mac?

Thanks

[Brian Dunnington]

if you want to forward notifications to your Mac from your PC, you
dont even need the impersonator. just follow the instructions here:
http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/help/forwarding.aspx#tomac

as for a way to verify if the notifications are arriving on your Mac,
there is probably a way to turn on some kind of logging, but i dont
know how to do it. keep in mind that the app has to be registered on
the Mac as well or the notifications will be rejected. (one way to
ensure this is to have the app re-register on the PC and that
registration will get forwarded to the Mac).

[Tintin]

I set up everything, removed all my applications, register, my mac
sees nothing!

On Dec 4, 4:35 pm, Brian Dunnington <briandunning...@gmail.com> wrote:
> if you want to forward notifications to your Mac from your PC, you
> dont even need the impersonator. just follow the instructions here:http://www.growlforwindows.com/gfw/help/forwarding.aspx#tomac
>
> as for a way to verify if the notifications are arriving on your Mac,
> there is probably a way to turn on some kind of logging, but i dont
> know how to do it. keep in mind that the app has to be registered on
> the Mac as well or the notifications will be rejected. (one way to
> ensure this is to have the app re-register on the PC and that
> registration will get forwarded to the Mac).
>

[Brian Dunnington]

do you have the right password set up on your Mac and the same
password set up in your forwarding prefs in GfW?

are you using the right hostname/address & port (9887 for UDP) in your
GfW forwarding prefs?

do you have 'listen for network notifications' and 'allow remote
application registration' both enabled on your mac?

do you have forwarding enabled in GfW?

that really is all it takes to forward from GfW to a Mac - i am using
it right now and it works good. double check all of settings and make
sure you can access your Mac from your PC using the host/port you used
to configure the forwarding.

[Tintin]

Everything is checked.
I use the same password. For the hostname i use ip address just to be
sure.
Eveyrthing is checked correclty.
I ping my mac.

The one thing i am not sure is if my mac receives it. I mean is there
a firewall on osx from where i should allow UDP. I cant find it

On Dec 4, 6:49 pm, Brian Dunnington <briandunning...@gmail.com> wrote:
> do you have the right password set up on your Mac and the same
> password set up in your forwarding prefs in GfW?
>
> are you using the right hostname/address & port (9887 for UDP) in your
> GfW forwarding prefs?
>
> do you have 'listen for network notifications' and 'allow remote
> application registration' both enabled on your mac?
>
> do you have forwarding enabled in GfW?
>
> that really is all it takes to forward from GfW to a Mac - i am using
> it right now and it works good. double check all of settings and make
> sure you can access your Mac from your PC using the host/port you used
> to configure the forwarding.
>

[Tintin]

OK finally got it working, i think littlesnitch was the bad boy!

It s so cool!
Do you think one day we will have images sent as well?

[Brian Dunnington]

> OK finally got it working, i think littlesnitch was the bad boy!

glad to hear you got it sorted out.

> It s so cool!
> Do you think one day we will have images sent as well?

going from PC to Mac, i have to use the UDP format, which does not
support images. it never will since it is being deprecated. once Mac
supports GNTP, then images will be supported.

going from Mac to PC using the Impersonator is maybe possible. the
serialized Distributed Objects TCP stream contains a bunch of binary
information that i am still trying to understand. just from the size
of the packets and the contents i can understand, i think images can
be sent as binary data that way. it will still depend on whether the
original sender (on the Mac) is sending the image or not, but if they
do, i think i will eventually be able to figure out how to capture
that data.

[Tintin]

Ok great to hear all of that. I read about GNTP being in growl 1.3.
Hope we will see it soon ;)

Thanks

[kLy]

I can't get this to work :(

There doesn't seem to be any instructions. Specifically there doesn't
seem to be any info on what to do on the Windows side?

I start up Growl Impersonator and it shows up on my Mac as a thing to
forward to. So, I check the box to forward to that one and I make sure
GfW is running but I still don't get notifications :(

Do I need to subscribe to localhost on the Windows machine? I tried
that too but no dice.

Thanks!

On Dec 4, 12:10 am, Brian Dunnington <briandunning...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[Brian Dunnington]

> There doesn't seem to be any instructions. Specifically there doesn't
> seem to be any info on what to do on the Windows side?
>
> I start up Growl Impersonator and it shows up on my Mac as a thing to
> forward to. So, I check the box to forward to that one and I make sure
> GfW is running but I still don't get notifications :(

that is all you have to do really. on the Windows side, make sure the
impersonator is started (it starts by default when you launch it, but
if you click 'Stop', it will stop listening). on the Mac side, when
you see the impersonator show up and enable forwarding to it, make
sure to not set a password. the notifications from the Mac to the PC
have to come over with no password in order to be understood. however,
if you want to, you can enter a password in the impersonator to use a
password between the impersonator and GfW (though, there really is not
much need since it is never leaving your local machine).

> Do I need to subscribe to localhost on the Windows machine? I tried
> that too but no dice.

nope, you dont need to subscribe to anything. if notifications are not
coming over, try sending some notifications that should work. i know
that simple AppleScript notifications and GrowlTunes notifications
work (at least for me), so maybe try those out first to see if
anything comes over at all. if those work, then maybe other types of
notifications are sending some data that the impersonator cant
decipher. if those simple tests dont even work, i am not sure what
else to try yet, but i will keep investigating.

[kLy]

Great, thanks :)

OK, I tried just a GrowlTunes notification but G4W still doesn't pick
up anything. In the Growl prefs on the Windows machine, it doesn't
even have the growl impersonator registered as an app.

I ran wireshark and the Windows machine is definitely receiving the
UDP and TCP packets from my Mac. Here is a PCAP dump if it helps debug
this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/118850/growl.pcap

Thanks! :)

[Brian Dunnington]

the impersonator wont show up in GfW - it is just a transparent proxy,
so the actual apps sending the notifications should show up in GfW (in
your case, GrowlTunes).

if the network traffic is definitely reaching the Windows machine,
then either 1) the impersonator cant understand the TCP data coming
from the Mac, or 2) the message is getting lost between the
impersonator and GfW.

you can follow the instructions in the link below to enable some
logging in GfW. this will help determine if the message is making it
to GfW at all, or if it is failing at the Impersonator. try enabling
the logging and do some more tests, then check the logs to see what
you have got. post back here and we can try to figure it out.

how to enable logging -
http://groups.google.com/group/growl-for-windows/browse_thread/thread/1c17687b801efff0/038d1645921177c3?hl=en&lnk=gst&q=logging#038d1645921177c3

[kLy]

Ok, gave that a try.

Absolutely nothing gets logged into the Log folder when I send
something from my Mac :(

Thanks

On Jan 4, 6:08 pm, Brian Dunnington <briandunning...@gmail.com> wrote:
> the impersonator wont show up in GfW - it is just a transparent proxy,
> so the actual apps sending the notifications should show up in GfW (in
> your case, GrowlTunes).
>
> if the network traffic is definitely reaching the Windows machine,
> then either 1) the impersonator cant understand the TCP data coming
> from the Mac, or 2) the message is getting lost between the
> impersonator and GfW.
>
> you can follow the instructions in the link below to enable some
> logging in GfW. this will help determine if the message is making it
> to GfW at all, or if it is failing at the Impersonator. try enabling
> the logging and do some more tests, then check the logs to see what
> you have got. post back here and we can try to figure it out.
>

> how to enable logging -http://groups.google.com/group/growl-for-windows/browse_thread/thread...
>
>

[Brian Dunnington]

well, although it is not good news, it does narrow things down.

that means that the Impersonator is either 1) not even receiving the
notifications, or 2) unable to parse the notifications properly.

since you verified that network traffic is making it to the Win
machine, #1 is unlikely. as long as the Impersonator is open and
running, it should be able to receive the notifications.

the most likely culprit is that the Impersonator cannot parse the
notifications properly. i only have one Mac to test on, but the
Impersonator is able to parse the notifications from GrowlTunes and
AppleScript for me, but maybe something is different on different Macs
or different versions of Growl or different versions of OSX? there is
no logging that is user-configurable in the Impersonator, though i had
planned to add some. I will see if i can add some basic logging and
maybe send you an updated version that might at least shed some more
light on what is going on.

[kLy]

Great!

Thanks a bunch. Great to see this being made. This was always a sore
spot for me as I waited patiently for Growl to do GNTP (and who knows
when that will be:)

[Brian Dunnington]

for all two people who were interested in this, i have made some big
changes and will be releasing an updated solution shortly.

running the Impersonator on the Windows side and trying to
reverse-engineer the Cocoa DO objects is just too error-prone to be
reliable. i went back to the drawing board and came up with what i
think is a much better solution. the Impersonator app for Windows has
been deprecated and is no longer needed. instead, there is a small
utility that you run on the Mac machine which does the following:

1. uses Bonjour to look for machines advertising the GNTP protocol
(like GfW does)
2. for each GNTP machine it detects, it advertises a separate Bonjour
service on Growl (Mac)'s Bonjour port
3. this causes the machine to show up in Growl (Mac)'s list of
machines to forward to
4. when notifications are forwarded to the selected machines, they are
actually forwarded to the utility app on the same machine (this has
the benefit that the DO objects are natively decoded correctly)
5. at that point, the utility can transform the notification and send
it on to the original GNTP destination

in my limited testing, it works about a hundred times better than the
original Impersonator. it even supports images in notifications**.
this approach also lets you run the small utility on just one Mac
machine instead of having to run the Impersonator on every Windows
machine that you want to forward to. i am just going to clean up the
code a bit and figure out the best way to package it up and deploy it.
this is my first Cocoa app, so all that stuff is new to me.

** - forwarded Growl notifications can either contain raw data for an
image, or an NSImage reference. however, there is a bug in Growl
itself that causes the NSImages to not be forwarded correctly, so only
images sent in raw data format can correctly be forwarded by this
utility (which is the same behavior as the native Mac-to-Mac
forwarding).

[Bruce Howells]

Make that three people interested. :-) If a guinea pig/victim/
tester would be helpful to you, I'd be glad to give something a smoke
test.

On Mar 26, 12:49 pm, Brian Dunnington <briandunning...@gmail.com>
wrote:

>  new_mac_to_pc_utility.png
> 80KViewDownload

[Brian Dunnington]

i havent had much of a change to play with this lately, but it does
work and is usable, even if it is not very well refined. i will try to
find some time this weekend or early next week to wrap the app up and
send out a link for anyone that wants to try it out.

[Brian Dunnington]

well, i took another look at this and cleaned it up a little bit and
am going to offer it up to anyone who wants to try it out. there are a
lot of caveats, so please read carefully:

- this is the first ObjC/Mac app i have ever written, and it shows
- the app is currently a normal windowed app, even though it provides
no UI functionality (eventually it would become a daemon type service
or maybe something that lives in the menu bar)
- you must leave the Password field for the computers that show up in
Growl's pref pane blank for any GfW computers you are forwarding to
- you have to be running the GfW v2.0.3.* beta or later and uncheck
the 'Require passwords for LAN apps'
- there is a bug in Growl v1.2 and earlier that sometimes treats
forward destinations as inactive, even if they are marked as enabled
(i am not sure if it is fixed in the 1.2.x betas or not, but i dont
think it is). there is no workaround for this other than restarting
Growl.
- keep in mind that applications must be registered with GfW in order
to show notifications. that means that if the app previously
registered with Growl on the Mac and does not re-send a Registration
request, GfW will silently ignore subsequent notifications. (usually,
restarting the app in question on the Mac will cause it to
re-register, but the exact behavior varies by app). a good way to
monitor what GfW is doing is to enable logging:
http://groups.google.com/group/growl-for-windows/browse_thread/thread/1c17687b801efff0/038d1645921177c3?lnk=gst&q=enable+logging#038d1645921177c3
- if you try this out, please please please report back your
experience to me. i cant make it any better if i dont know what does
and doesnt need improvement

all that said, it works for me for the apps that i have tested. i
would love to hear other peoples experience. this little tool
definitely needs some polish, but i would like know if it at least
functionally does what it is supposed to do.

here is the link to the file. it is a .zip file with the app bundle
inside. i have never deployed a Mac app before, so i just assumed that
was all that was necessary, but if that is not sufficient, just let me
know.

http://groups.google.com/group/growl-for-windows/web/GfW%20Masquerader.zip

[Carey Bishop]

Hi Brian,

Could you upload this file again, or host it on the GfW website?

It seems that Google have lost it ("This page is invalid").

Thanks,

  Carey

[Brian Dunnington]

i am attaching it to this post. if it doesnt come through, i will try
hosting it somewhere else.

keep in mind all of the caveats from my earlier post - this is a rough
draft for sure, but it does work. and i do have some other good news -
the Growl/Mac guys are working hard on getting GNTP support finalized
for their 1.3 release. there is no timeline yet for the release, but i
have been using the development branch to help them work out any
remaining issues and it really is close. hopefully my temporary
solution will not be needed much longer.

[Carey Bishop]

Cool, thanks Brian.