Articles by: andrina

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.

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.

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One of the great gems of Apple Remote Desktop 2, and while it’s not hidden in the documentation, no one seems to have sung its virtues – until now.

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It was a dark and stormy afternoon when Ian (maccanada) and I sat down to fight the beast that is LDAP migration from an up and running 10.3 Server to a brand new, out of the box, 10.4 server. Lucky for you, the battle was won by us, and the gory details of the fight will lay themselves out for you as you read on…

Revised Password Server details in article Aug 11, 2005

This article, the first of an intro to HPC, could also be called, “Centralized Scripting for Workstation Management”, so don’t let the scary HPC title put you off! In reality we can all learn a bit from how an HPC (High Performance Computing) environment is managed to better streamline even the smallest computer setup – after all, more streamlined means more spare time to spend out of the office!

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That info tab with all it’s empty fields has been taunting me with all it’s wonderful uses, but sitting down and filling in 500+ users with all their individual data is not something even I’d wish on my worst enemy!

Read On for details on how to have all the fields filled in 30 minutes or less…

We’re all having fun with Dashboard widgets, right? If nothing else it’s a useful way to try and convince ourselves that we all need 30″ displays just for all the new informational widgets we have now…

So, just to keep up with all the rest, the new AFP548.com RSS widget

See, told you Dashboard was useful!

Getting all the Xsan pieces straight in your head

When Xsan came out, it was the first time that the average Apple System Administrator had seen a Storage Area Network (SAN), and as a result, there’s a lot of questions about how to best deal the very fundamentals of an Xsan setup. Here we’re hoping to cover a lot of the questions that are being asked, and help you on your way to the healthiest Xsan environment you could get.

Stupid-simple high availablity server solutions using the built-in failover scripts in 10.3.

OS X Server has had a variant of this system since 10.2, however few people have used it, or even realize it exists. Here’s a walkthrough of how to provide an active/passive solution for web and MySQL services.

Udated: 3/30/05: Fixed information about LUN masking on Xserve RAID.

Keep your monitors happy and ghost free

We have a number of machines here with colour calibrated monitors, and to keep this colour as constant as we can it means that power to the monitor can never be turned off. While modern monitors are certainly better than they used to be in dealing with burn-in, we noticed this was becomming an issue for us, so, here’s a tip on how to run the screensaver over the login window.