Archive for May, 2006

Well, it was going to be a big shoot-out with all the big names in OSXS Mail solutions, but trawling through them all would have taken far too long and got far too boring. So imagine that the preliminary rounds took place behind close doors and you’re here for the final. We’re going to be pitching the commercial Kerio Mail Server up against free-if-you-don’t-need-all-the-features Zimbra Collaboration suite which comes in 3 flavours (one free, and two paid-for).

Read on for the results…

Sponsored by IronGate Server Management & Consulting, in association with Digital Transitions the innagural OS X Integrators Birds of a Feather gathering is taking place at MaRS Discovery District on College St. at University Ave., Toronto, Canada on Tues June 13th from 6PM-8PM.

This bi-monthly seminar series aims to introduce administrators and technical co-ordinators to real life implementations of OS X and OS X Server, in a wide range of practical situations. Presentations are given by industry experts and/or system administrators, in a format which fosters open discussions and group collaboration.

Registration and more details of the event are available on Apple’s Seminar website

In part 1 of the series, I covered the reasons why you would want to separate a single server into multiple servers. Now we move on to the nitty-gritty: how do you actually accomplish the task?

Goal: Set up a separate server in the DMZ that handles web serving and external mail transport. This will reduce the number of direct connections from the outside to the inside server. External contributors will still connect directly to the internal mail server to pick up their mail via IMAP.

Ed. Note: You can find this article with a bit more graphic flavor at the author’s website.

The next MacEnterprise.org webcast, Apple Remote Desktop 3 and Automator: A match made in heaven, will take place on Tuesday, May 16. Join Nader Nafissi, Product Manager for Apple Remote Desktop, Sal Soghoian, Product Manager for Automator and Steve Hayman, Senior Consulting Engineer for an informative discussion on how you can use Apple Remote Desktop 3 and Automator to automate your routine management tasks. Learn how you can create Automator workflows using the over 30 actions included with Apple Remote Desktop 3 as well as how you can create your own actions.

Read on for more…

A perl script to read individual user spam and ham folders.

After I got Bayes learning to work correctly in SpamAssassin, I wanted a more convenient way for users to mark messages that were incorrectly classified. The Apple recommendation, as I’m sure you know, requires the user to redirect the message to a particular email address, where a nightly script will process it.

Read on for more…

PaperCut Software has just finished their first version of PaperCut NG for OS X Server. The Mac version has all the functionally of the Windows edition including, print quota, print monitoring, shared accounts, release station and rule based filtering of print jobs. The system works by hooking into CUPS.

Details of the Mac version are available at:
http://www.papercut.biz/pcng/mac/

The software is currently in a public preview period and the developers are keen to get feedback from Mac server administrators, particularly those working in schools and higher education.

A bit more information can be found on the developer’s web log.

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.

Some thoughts on getting a small office network setup.

Read on for the beginning of a four part series on configuring some basic connectivity on your server.