Have you ever wanted to get at those pre-release software releases on the Apple Developer Connection, but you haven't been able to convince your boss to shell out the $500/year that it costs? If so you are in luck!

Apple has now changed the Mac Developer Program to match the $99/year price of the iPhone one. Follow the link below for more details...

http://developer.apple.com/programs/mac/

For those who haven't tried it, Nagios is quite a cool monitoring package that will run on UNIX (Ed. There fixed that!) variants, including OS X Server.  John C. Welch wrote up an article on setting up Nagios with a Leopard Server which was my inspiration.  While running Nagios, you quickly find that the Plugin system of adding commands to communicate with servers, switches, and all SNMP-speaking devices is...well...awesome. It would be cool if there was a way to pull information out of your Server Admin-managed services and monitor it with Nagios.  I wrote up a small Google Doc on how to do just that.

 Using Felim Whiteley's libsrvrmgrd-osx package, you can pull a wealth of information out of Server Admin over port 311 on a machine running OS X Server the least of which is whether or not a service is running.

 The document is here https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AaQfhLeDuWNcZGNibTU2ODNfNTFjYnF6bjZucg&hl=en and I welcome all comments and suggestions!  

We mentioned this a few weeks ago. The results are in and can be found here.

There's precious few studies about the state of the Mac landscape on these topics and this one is an interesting read.

I know that this isn't completely tested to see if it is a consistent behavior, but I ran into an issue after upgrading a Leopard server to Snow. The server was running mail services utilizing both the standard spool location and an alternate mail store. 

 After the upgrade all seemed to be well, but we shortly discovered that the users who used the alternate mail store didn't have access to their existing mail. The users in the standard location were just fine.

 After poking around I saw that the alternate store contained two sets of user mail directories within the dovecot directory. One was named with the users shortname, ala Cyrus and the other used a GUID, ala Dovecot. Apparently during the upgrade the existing folders were converted to Dovecot format, yet new folders were also made. By renaming the folders with the shortnames to the GUID, proper functionality was restored to the users mailboxes.

 It was a simple fix, but it took some poking to figure it out. Also being new to Dovecot it took me longer than it probably should have to resolve. Hopefully this will save someone else some time. 

We've just emerged from the dumpster behind Moscone Center and buried in a pile of lettuce leaves and coffee gounds we've managed to find four more full conference passes for the Macworld Conference & Expo next week in San Francisco. If you are going to be in the area, love Mac system administration, and want to go to some awesome sessions then you need to try and snag one of these passes.

Same rules as before as this is an email race.

The first four(4) people to get an email to: mw2010ticket@afp548.com will get one of the passes. Use "MW2010 Email Race" for the subject line.

On your marks. Get set. GO!

We have our final round of winners!

Going to be in the San Francisco area next week? Bummed out that you couldn't afford/con your boss into buying you a Macworld Conference pass for 2010? Well you are in luck!

We've managed to score a limited number of full conference passes for the show next week. These aren't the expo floor only passes, these are the conference passes so you can go join your Mac sysadmin peers and learn all sorts of fun new stuff.

Because this is all on very short notice we are going to do the contest that everyone hates. The email race.

The first six(6) people to get an email to: mw2010ticket@afp548.com will get one of the passes. Use "MW2010 Email Race" for the subject line.

On your marks. Get set. GO!

And we have our winners!

If it wasn't you then keep your eyes peeled. We are digging around for more passes...

DNS can always bite you in the rear. in some case you run your own DNS server and you can correct the issues. In other cases, you're beholden to the powers that be to determine your fate. All is not lost, however, it is possible to run your own DNS proxy to override specific answers. It's not an ideal solution, and can certainly be accused of being a "hack" but it can be invaluable in some situations.

Read on for how to do this...

GroupLogic is working to bridge the gap between corporate mass archival solutions and Mac OS X. With a new product called ArchiveConnect, the makers of Extreme Z-IP now have a product that provides the ability to fully integrate CommVault's Simpana. This allows you to reduce the required footprint of on-line disk capacity while being able to meet compliance and data retention requirements. Check out their webinar at: http://www.commvault.com/webinars/details.asp?id=1083 

 

 

You may have noticed that your Mac OS X Server has become a bit aggressive about flagging e-mail as spam. This is because the default ruleset was created long enough ago that any e-mail from the year 2010 was obvious spam, or sent by time traveling robots.

All you need to do to correct the issue is to update the future date rule.

We were about to post our own article on this topic when Apple went and posted an official one. This fix should work any SpamAssassin setup that you have.

Enjoy!

Apple TS3187: Mac OS X Server may classify some inbound messages sent on or after January 1, 2010 as spam