Archive for March, 2010

Migrating 10.5 iCal Server to 10.6 with group calendars

In Mac OS X 10.5 Server, user and group calendars were available in iCal server.  User calendars worked pretty well, but group calendars were a bit of a kludge.  The biggest mess was the web calendar.  I’m glad to say a lot of this has been vastly improved in 10.6 server. Read on to find out about my migration journey and the numerous bumps in the road. 

 

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Labman will be celebrating it's 11th Year at Northampton Community College on June 7th – 9th, 2010

Labman continues to be a low-key, inexpensive, and friendly conference intended for persons who are involved in the maintenance of computing labs in higher education, K–12, or library facilities. We are looking forward to the continued enhancement of the content shared an presented each year by fellow lab managers.

Please see http://www.labmanconference.org/ for more information.  We have some great events lined up and look forward to seeing old and new faces this year.
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I will quickly note that I have attended 8 LabMan conferences over the years and hosted 1 of them.  I have found them to be both enjoyable and useful while being a fairly "cheap date" – even the one I got to stress out about while hosting 🙂 .  I encourage folks to seriously consider going, especially if you are out on the East Coast.  

Tom "Macintosh Doctor" Johnson

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For those who haven't tried it, Nagios is quite a cool monitoring package that will run on UNIX (Ed. There fixed that!) variants, including OS X Server.  John C. Welch wrote up an article on setting up Nagios with a Leopard Server which was my inspiration.  While running Nagios, you quickly find that the Plugin system of adding commands to communicate with servers, switches, and all SNMP-speaking devices is…well…awesome. It would be cool if there was a way to pull information out of your Server Admin-managed services and monitor it with Nagios.  I wrote up a small Google Doc on how to do just that.

 Using Felim Whiteley's libsrvrmgrd-osx package, you can pull a wealth of information out of Server Admin over port 311 on a machine running OS X Server the least of which is whether or not a service is running.

 The document is here https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AaQfhLeDuWNcZGNibTU2ODNfNTFjYnF6bjZucg&hl=en and I welcome all comments and suggestions!  

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