Articles by: mbartosh

Worth pointing out, since it contradicts what some people have said in the past.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303697

Update: The dates are now 6/27-29 in Austin.

Apple has a new training class coming out that deals with Advanced Server Administration.

I’m proud to have done some work during the development of the class, and happy to say that it includes material from my Panther book that has been updated for Tiger (specifically, Part I). I encourage you to look into attending the beta in Austin, TX.

This class represents a unique cooperation between O’Reilly and Apple. It’s success or failure will likely determine how long that cooperation lasts. As I’ve mentioned before, O’Reilly is very skeptical of the viability of the IT Centric Mac markets. So I urge you all to look into this class and, if it’s worthy, attend the class or buy the materials.

The gist of it is this: there will be no Tiger edition of my book.

The Panther version took me a year and a half to write. I’ve been working on the tiger version less than a year, and it was projected to be 30% longer. For some reason timelines this time around were shorter, and the choice came down to sacrificing depth or canceling the project. I chose the latter. I proposed a third option, but it didn’t fly:

Apple has a team of tech writers and their docs still lack depth and in many cases understanding of how this technology is deployed in IT-centric markets. (ie command usage statements that don’t add much understanding and don’t highlight the command’s most typical usage). Therefor I think that any sort of in-depth documentation of Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server should really be a team effort. What I wanted to see was a Mac OS X IT Bookshelf from O’Reilly, with contributions from some of the more cognizant thinkers in various aspects of Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server System Administration. This bookshelf would cover Mac OS X Server, Mac OS X, XSan, etc all at the same level my book was written that.

As a less aggressive goal I also offered to break up the book into several titles (each section into its own book). In either case, O’Reilly didn’t perceive demand. I don’t understand that decision, but they’re within their rights to make it.

When dealing with funky network issues it’s handy to be able to tweak configd a bit to see what’s going on. We have an older article on configd that explains more of what it does, but here are some quick thoughts on getting more debugging and other options out of configd on 10.4.

Monday’s Security Upate provides a fix to a critical vulnerability that allows malicious parties to trivially obtain administrative passwords.

In other words, it would behoove you to run this update sooner rather than later, or make sure you use a VPN when admining your server.