Archive for November, 2005

It’s been a few weeks since RAID Admin (hereon known as RA) and firmware 1.5 was released. Now seems like a good time to go through the options, both old and new, explain a bit about them, and then discuss the best way to update your firmware, along with *why* you might need to. This article does not address Xserve RAIDs in an Xsan environment.

How to get greylisting working with the included Postfix SMTP server on OS X Server 10.4

Greylisting, if you’ve not encountered it before, is the process of temporarily rejecting e-mail from an unknown host/sender/recipient combination. Spammers will tend not to bother trying to resend the e-mail later while legitimate servers will.

Read on for more information on how to add this to your arsenal against spam and viruses.

We’ve all seen the NAT tab on Server Admin, and been very impressed that we can do IP forwarding, or IP forwarding and NAT – but where to after that? Enter The NATural, an all new GUI tool that allows you to manage those NAT settings.

Most beautifully, this tool allows administration of NAT settings without modifying or replacing any of the default Apple software, and it also has a “demo” mode where it will recognize if you’ve installed to software on an OS X Client machine which will let you take a look at all the settings without modifying anything on your local machine.

So, thanks to Jamie Griffin of GDog Software for getting frustrated with natd, and sharing The NATural with the rest of us.

Xsan Admin 1.2 has been released, and is available for download here. There are some very important instructions to follow on this upgrade – like, don’t upgrade from version 1.0 to version 1.2 directly. The full instructions for the update are available on Apple’s knowledge base. For more information about the upgrade, also refer to this article, and note the big red letters here about reading the instructions before upgrading. Of course, with any upgrade, we always recommend having an up-to-date back-up, and if you have the opportunity, to perform the upgrade on a test system before applying it to any production environment.

As with any upgrade, there are some substantial fixes in this, most notably, the invalid serial number issue has been resolved. As we mentioned in the 10.4.3 upgrade piece, there’s some improvement in AFP performance also. We are however still limited by the no greater than 2TB LUN support, this means that the new 7TB Xserve RAIDs still have to be sliced for use with Xsan to take advantage of all your new storage space.

The official list of improvements are available here.

I believe this is new to SIU as of 10.4.3.

You can now, when choosing the source for a Network Install, after clicking the ‘Customize’ button, select install options the way you would during a local CD install.

For the enterprise this is pretty nice – for example, at the newspaper where I work we have roughly 10 ‘remote’ offices connected to our core network by T1 lines. Removing the enormous number of unneeded printer drivers in the base install is quite useful in this scenario.

The MacEnterprise.org group will be presenting a Webcast on the LANDesk Management Suite on Tuesday, November 15 at 1:00 pm EST. Kent Prows and Bill Smith from LANDesk will be presenting.

Apple released Mac OS X Server 10.4.3 a couple days ago. The full details about the improvements are detailed in Apple KB#302089, but there’s a few really nice bells and whistles in this update that might just make it the reason to upgrade your 10.3 servers. You can think of this article as a sort of “greatest hits” of the KB article.

Read on for more…