Articles by: andrina

Sponsored by IronGate Server Management & Consulting, in association with Digital Transitions the next OS X Integrators Birds of a Feather gathering is taking place at MaRS Discovery District on College St. at University Ave., Toronto, Canada on Wed Sept 27th 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. Topics to be touched upon this month will be Mastering images, NetBoot, NetRestore, and automation of imaging.

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

If you’re planning to go – and we are – you may want to sign up this week as the early registration savings end today!

If you’re thinking of going – and you should – the best we can tell you is that there’s great people teaching (Schoun Regan, Scott Neal, Bill Wiecking, Phil Rinehart (MacEnterprise), great topics (Directory Services Integration, OS X Server/Xserve, Large Scale WiFi, Admin Skills, Security) and it’s in a cool location (right on Monterey Bay).

It will be a good gathering – hope to meet you there.
For more information and registration go to www.macnetworkersretreat.com

Port Trunking, Trunked Ethernet and Bonded Interfaces are some of the terms that get thrown around for what is more commonly known as 802.3ad. In both Apple’s documentation and more generally accepted is the term Link Aggregation, or Link Aggregate Group (LAG) which is perhaps a more visual description of what is really going on here – an aggregate of network interfaces which allow you to beef up the total bandwidth to your server with little to no further cable or networking hardware changes.

Read on for more…

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

You find reading the plethora of OS X Server knowledge on AFP548.com just isn’t enough, and are feeling some horizons need to be expanded….

You need something more challenging to listen to on your commute…

Enter – the AFP548.com podcast!

Read on for more…

With all the issues related to Sarbanes-Oxley compliancy, and contracts being written to cover all losses and lawsuits related to any security breach in network setup these days, along with the desire for System Administrators to manage all of their user accounts from one location, I’ve been looking into getting an existing Communigate Pro mail setup authenticating to OS X Server’s built in Open Directory.

Read on for more…

Our new AFP548.com RSS widget is now universally great – well, ok, perhaps I mean it works on the new Intel based Macs. Either way, you can now download the updated version which works both on PPC and Intel in our downloads section.

The sudo (superuser do) command is a very useful and powerful part of the OS X unix underpinnings. It gives the ability for certain users to execute some or all commands as root while logging these activities providing a clear bread-trail of who did what to the machine.

By default only an administrative user can use sudo on any OS X machine, but with some modification of the sudoers file, you can grant specific machines and/or users access to sudo some or all of their commands.

Read on for more…

Apple has put up a nice bit of documentation on their developer site on some the more advanced topics that systems administrator may be interested in.

Topics covered include Kerberizing the Mac OS X VPN Server, Creating Mail Account Bundles, Setting Up a Network Library, Setting Up Key-Based SSH Login and Incorporating User Images in Open Directory.

All of this material is available for reading directly on their site, or you can download the PDF for on the road/plane reading material.

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.