Archive for January, 2007

In a small rev., Apple today announced support for 750GB drives in the Xserve RAID – now giving it a massive 10.5 TB capacity. Along with that also came a price drop.

The drives are available as a CTO option – the standard configs are 1TB, 3.5TB and 7TB

Full details are on the Xserve RAID site

I wrote this script for a client for whom I had set up an iChat server last spring. They asked if it would be possible for the server, in addition to its standard functions, to also maintain a buddy group containing all their local accounts (a feature my wife calls a “persistent buddy list”). From their point of view, having such a list would be extremely useful and having it be maintained by the server would guarantee it stayed up to date and accurate without wasting an employee’s time maintaining it. Unfortunately, neither the base Jabber server nor Apple’s modified version of it provide this feature, but it is possible to emulate it by directly modifying the files where the server stores its user information.

The Problem:

While you can bind OS X computers to a Windows Domain, getting access to single sign on AD services in the process, there remains a weak link in that the CUPS smbspool process does not support Kerberos.  So, while you can setup an Active Directory printer (which are even listed in the Printer Setup Utility Browse list) you can’t print to them without getting an Access Denied error.

The Solution… sort of:

First off, thanks to everyone who spoke and attended at Macworld. The MacIT sessions were well attended and I heard several positive comments throughout the week. We’d like to hear your comments and feedback on the sessions so we’ve setup an email address for just that. Email us at [email protected] with your likes, dislikes, and what we can do to improve your skill set next year (what you’d like to see).

Already on the topic list is the MacIT Kickoff, which centered around Apple’s support of it’s products (both hardware and software) and opened a dialog between many attendees as to the best way to file bug reports, report hardware issues, and learn about support. Two major items seem to rise above the rest: Apple needs to do a better job of letting IT admins know about support options and IT admins who currently don’t use Bug Reporter should do so.The best attended track was the Imaging and Deployment track, so my thanks go out to the team at MacEnterprise and guest speakers who made that track so compelling.

So let’s hear your comments!

There’s been a fair amount of discussion recently regarding filename renaming, and while this is indeed one of those things that there are as many ways to do as there are to skin a cat, here’s an example of one way, with a bit of explanation as to how you can customize to suit your own needs.

These are the final slides from James Turner, of CRYPTOCard, and Andrina’s presentation at Macworld 2007.

In the near future we’re going to try and re-do the demos in Quicktime with commentary to go along with these slides.

You can download the slides in PDF format here.

These are the slides from Andrina and Nigel’s presentation on “Optimizing Mac OS X Server File Services” at MacWorld 2007. As we promised the attendees… up within the hour! 🙂

For the new readers from the site who weren’t familiar with the site, welcome! and check out some of our other articles, as there is a lot of good stuff here.

You can download the slides here.

Update: MacFUSE are now doing their own installers, and you should definitely all be using those instead of these.

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/downloads/list

I’ve repackaged MacFUSE as an Apple installer package suitable for deployment.

MacFUSE-0.1.0b004-3.pkg.dmg

This package automatically loads the kernel extension for you if the installation volume is the same as the current boot volume.

References:

http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

http://fuse.sourceforge.net/

For those of you unclear on Fuse, it allows you to turn logical data collections into filesystems among other file system functions.. For example you can use this to create an ssh filesystem or perhaps exposing Directory Services as a file system, in addition to other “normal” file system functions like NTFS read/write.