Archive for category: Articles

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:

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.

HOWTO: Mac OS X BSDP Service using a GNU/Linux Server
This article describes how to setup a Linux machine to provide BSDP services to Apple Macintosh machines.

Read on for the whole recipe…

Syslog-ng can be used as a replacent for Apple's syslog. It gives the ability to filter logs on criterias others than just 'facility' as for example : name or IP address of the source machine.

Ed. Note: It's not really syslog that Apple includes in Tiger, but the Apple System Log, ASL. As of 10.4, however, all ASL did was essentially replicate syslog. As such you'll get some benefit from installing syslog-ng. However we hold out great hope that the promise of ASL will become a reality in future operating systems.

Custom AD add-ons continue! A script to manage who can log on to a machine.

Ed. Note: It would be possible to do this with a loginwindow SACL on the local systems, but this login hook will match the local machine’s hostname with a list of acceptable machines held in AD. Thus it’s a much more Windows-like way of doing this and helps the Mac fit in a bit more into the AD way of doing things.

In 10.3 and later, Macs bound to and and autheticating against AD kindly warn you when your password has expired and allow you to change it at the login screen. If you're like me and would rather have more control over that process — in other words, you'd like to choose the time, manner, and place in which your users are warned about approaching password expirations — then the default behavior leaves much to be desired.

Googling for other admins' solutions to this "feature deficit" didn't reveal what I was looking for, so I decided to write my own password expiration warning script and make it as universal as I could. By universal, I mean you shouldn't have to change a single thing in the script to get it to work at your site. It looks up everything it needs using various command line utilities.

Read on for more…