Archive for March, 2005

On behalf of the MacEnterprise.org Steering Committee, we would like to extend an invitation to everyone to attend the MacEnterprise Day in San Francisco. This FREE meeting and conference event will be held Sunday June 5, 2005, one day prior to the opening of Apple’s WWDC 2005.

We will be discussing topics relating to all aspects of deployment of macs in the enterprise, including:

-Directory Services
-Beginning your Enterprise deployment
-Network Home Directories and Directory Services
-Parallel computing, including XGrid and Pooch
-Apple Remote Desktop innovation
-Advanced troubleshooting
-Enterprise Streaming Services, including Audio and Video

as well as roundtable discussions about what’s hot in the enterprise today!

Registration is now open, and seating is limited. For more information, please visit:

http://macenterprise.org/enterpriseday

Stupid-simple high availablity server solutions using the built-in failover scripts in 10.3.

OS X Server has had a variant of this system since 10.2, however few people have used it, or even realize it exists. Here’s a walkthrough of how to provide an active/passive solution for web and MySQL services.

Udated: 3/30/05: Fixed information about LUN masking on Xserve RAID.

A quick way to get secure hashes of all yer goodies

A glance at the underground sites shows a growing number of rootkits in development. Combine this with known, unpatched vulns, like the iSync mrouter privs escalation vuln, and I’m feeling naked without a tripwire.

Ed. Note: A tripwire application hashes a set of files and then looks for the files to change. Hopefully alerting you when that happens.

How the … do I keep JBoss happy?

I’m having trouble finding troubleshooting information for the default JBoss installation on OS X Panther Server. Either no one is using it or no one but myself has had any trouble with it!

Get Windows to play nice with your OS X clients using NFS

AD integration works reasonably well for Mac OS X clients, but what if you’re running, say, an XServe G5, and you need to provide access to Windows-based home directories for multiple command-line users (via ssh, telnet, etc.) on your server simultaneously?

updated 3/29/05: fixed missing whacks in Windows paths.

This solves a problem with laptops (and/or desktops) being on again off again and perhaps missing the absolute time of the cron jobs run via periodic (daily, weekly, monthly).

We are getting to roll out Laptops to bunches of Faculty and staff and the Windows VPN server and the Windows Laptops play well with each other and the Windows laptops even have a little check box that you can check to tell it to NOT use the default gateway on the remote host. The Macs have no such "little check box".

Get syslog to do your bidding and send logs to a remote machine.

A quick run-through on how to make syslogd be promiscuous and take logs from strangers.

The MacEnterprise.org group will be presenting a Webcast on Enterprise Streaming Solutions on Tuesday, March 15 at 1:00 pm EDT. George Cook, a Consulting Engineer at Apple and Stephen Tonna, QuickTime Streaming Product Manager at Apple, will be presenting.

Streaming video is ideal for sharing rich media content, publishing lectures, and accessing educational programming, and it can make important school events accessible to the community, such as sporting events and commencement. After an update on QuickTime and MPEG-4 from Stephen Tonna, George will delve into specific scenarios for both live streaming and video-on-demand. Tune into this webcast to learn about the latest video streaming tools and techniques.

For more information on how to watch this Webcast, please visit the MacEnterprise.org website:

http://macenterprise.org/webcasts

The broadcast ID needed to view the webcast is ‘macenterprise‘.

If you are having trouble with ‘megaraid -destroyconfig’ run ‘megaraid -showdevices’ first to see drive status – stop rebuild processes with ‘megaraid -rebuild pd -stop’

(This only applies to situations where the RAID has failed so badly that rebuilding (which can take 8 or mor hours) is not an option. Proceed carefully!)