Archive for category: Articles

From looking at the mailing lists and discussion boards, you’ll see that a reasonable number of people seem to be having problems with their AFP servers under OS X Server 10.4.x, particularly under heavy load with network home directories, and particularly in terms of stability. I used to be one of those people, but the solutions presented in this article have (touch wood) resolved the vast majority of my issues.

Read on for all your AFP tuning needs…

Verifying large volumes can be a real pain, especially on systems that need to be up as much as possible.

Here’s some ideas on how to make this as painless as possible.

Mac OS X Server has tools to monitor trends in network traffic and look at your log files, but I’ve always wanted easy to read, detailed stats for my web server.

AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It’s open source and not too difficult to set up.

Using ACLs with WebDAV allows for much finer control.

In the past, in order to allow a user access either access locally to their home directory or remotely via WebDAV the ownerships on the folders either had to be owned by the user themselves for local access or owned by www for remote access. Because of this the POSIX permissions often got quite messy.

This is all a thing of the past now with Tiger and ACL implementation. The ability to add the user www to your existing home folders allows for many advantages over the previous way. With ACL’s administrators can override the older POSIX style UNIX permissions and bring their servers (including web based services) into the 21st century.

Managing Software Update with Open Directory is a nice feature of v10.4 Server, but trying to automate the delivery over those updates is a little cumbersome. Some users have set up a cron job to periodically execute the softwareupdate command-line utility. Doing so can present some issues like updates that require a restart, missed updates because the client was powered off during the scheduled execution, as well the question about applying updates while a user is currently logged into the client.

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…

The gist of it is this: there will be no Tiger edition of my book.

The Panther version took me a year and a half to write. I’ve been working on the tiger version less than a year, and it was projected to be 30% longer. For some reason timelines this time around were shorter, and the choice came down to sacrificing depth or canceling the project. I chose the latter. I proposed a third option, but it didn’t fly:

Apple has a team of tech writers and their docs still lack depth and in many cases understanding of how this technology is deployed in IT-centric markets. (ie command usage statements that don’t add much understanding and don’t highlight the command’s most typical usage). Therefor I think that any sort of in-depth documentation of Mac OS X or Mac OS X Server should really be a team effort. What I wanted to see was a Mac OS X IT Bookshelf from O’Reilly, with contributions from some of the more cognizant thinkers in various aspects of Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server System Administration. This bookshelf would cover Mac OS X Server, Mac OS X, XSan, etc all at the same level my book was written that.

As a less aggressive goal I also offered to break up the book into several titles (each section into its own book). In either case, O’Reilly didn’t perceive demand. I don’t understand that decision, but they’re within their rights to make it.

It’s been a few weeks since RAID Admin (hereon known as RA) and firmware 1.5 was released. Now seems like a good time to go through the options, both old and new, explain a bit about them, and then discuss the best way to update your firmware, along with *why* you might need to. This article does not address Xserve RAIDs in an Xsan environment.

How to get greylisting working with the included Postfix SMTP server on OS X Server 10.4

Greylisting, if you’ve not encountered it before, is the process of temporarily rejecting e-mail from an unknown host/sender/recipient combination. Spammers will tend not to bother trying to resend the e-mail later while legitimate servers will.

Read on for more information on how to add this to your arsenal against spam and viruses.

This is an updated to my article/instructions for making "Check Spelling" work in SquirrelMail.