Archive for category: Articles

As many probably already know, the iChat server introduced in 10.4 is based on Jabber and uses the XMPP protocol. This makes it possbible for the server to act not only as a standalone instant messaging server, but also as a gateway between many different protocols.

In this 9 page howto article (450kB PDF), you can find out more about how it all works with specific instructions on making the iChat server work with arguably the most popular IM network, MSN.

One of the big features of Tiger Server's mail server was the addition of spam filtering. It was a bit bumpy in the beginning, but once you fix the bayesian filtering things work quite nicely.

A question that always gets asked is, "How much spam am I blocking?" and there are several ways to tell. You can use a number of OSS monitoring solutions, comb the logs, or forward spam to a spam account. Reader filipp has submitted a nice solution to the problem that quickly creates a HTML chart of the spam totals. This way you can just glance at a web page and see how much you are blocking.

Read on for more…

In the move from the Apple Partition Map (APM), to the new GUID partition table (GPT) there’s a lot of questions around why, how and what does it mean to me. We’ve discovered a wonderful Technical Note on Apple’s Developer website answering all of these questions – Technical Note TN2166

Part 3 of the series where we focus on DNS and mail.

You can find Part 1 and Part 2 of this series which were published eariler.

Quicktime Streaming Server is not often talked about as one of the *big* features of OS X Server, but if you need to stream audio or video content it’s hard to beat. We’re going to take a look at setting up QTSS, the options available for broadcasting your live or pre-recorded content, and how to deploy a highly scalable, redundant solution using a load balancer to ensure performance levels.

Keeping logs of all your traffic

Although we’ve mentioned AWStats a number of times before, we’ve never really gotten into how to set it up. While this isn’t exceptionally hard, it’s nice to have someone go there before you if it’s your first time out. So, here’s a rundown of installing AWStats on OS X Server 10.4.

Take special note of step 16 which tells you to create a web realm for your AWStats install. Otherwise you stand a good chance of getting bitten by some of the AWStats exploits that crop up from time to time. The Apple documentation on this should make it quite easy for you to set up the realm.

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

So a while ago we put together an article on tuning your AFP server for OS X Server.

I’d been promising part #2 for a while, just to cover some odds and ends, but there has been a major development which made a lot of that work redundant, namely the release of the Universal version of OS X Server 10.4.7.

Read on for some perhaps surprising results…

No article I could find on the web touches the “PostgreSQL-PAM” topic specifically for Mac OS X users, so I decided to put all the pieces together. Thanks to Adrian Nida for the excellent article that provided the basic guidelines for configuring PAM.

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…