Archive for category: Articles

Get RADIUS authentication working with Open Directory and more on OS X Server

RADIUS allows for 802.1x, WPA Enterprise and other forms of authentication. Between RADIUS and LDAP you should be able to authenticate just about any network service that you need.

Right, we all hate ads, don’t we?

Good. Then if we could use the DNS built in to OS X server to block the ads from appearing on any client that uses
that DNS server, it would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?

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.

Get Windows to play nice with your OS X clients using NFS

AD integration works reasonably well for Mac OS X clients, but what if you’re running, say, an XServe G5, and you need to provide access to Windows-based home directories for multiple command-line users (via ssh, telnet, etc.) on your server simultaneously?

updated 3/29/05: fixed missing whacks in Windows paths.

This solves a problem with laptops (and/or desktops) being on again off again and perhaps missing the absolute time of the cron jobs run via periodic (daily, weekly, monthly).

We are getting to roll out Laptops to bunches of Faculty and staff and the Windows VPN server and the Windows Laptops play well with each other and the Windows laptops even have a little check box that you can check to tell it to NOT use the default gateway on the remote host. The Macs have no such "little check box".

Get syslog to do your bidding and send logs to a remote machine.

A quick run-through on how to make syslogd be promiscuous and take logs from strangers.

Clones across the network

With a little bit of work you can have rsync cloning a primary server to a backup server. If the primary server ever fails, all you have to do is reboot the backup from the cloned system and away you go.

Overview of OS X backup options.

The most frequent question that I am asked is how someone can protect all of the data that they store on their Xserves and Xserve RAIDs. It’s a good question, too!

Most of us may have other platforms on our networks as well, so how are all of these servers and clients going to play together?

Since I was faced with this question myself, I decided to write an extensive article, detailing some of the cross-platform solutions out on the market today, primarily IBM’s TSM, Atempo’s Time Navigator and Tolis Group’s new BRU release.

The document is housed in the Projects section on my site, www.district13computing.com, and on MacEnterprise.org. I hope this helps shed some light on a very important decision that we all must face with Mac OS X Server deployments.

GeoCenter has deployed a new 100 node Xserve G5 cluster that will be used for running distributed processing applications from GeoCenter’s SeisUP� seismic processing system.

We have published information on our website describing the tools and techniques we used to setup and manage the cluster, including Radmind for managing system images, Apple’s Server Assistant for auto-configuring each node, and a number of custom Perl scripts written by GeoCenter developer Michael Beam. We also provide information regarding the differences between Mac OS X and other Unix platforms that we encountered while porting our code to Mac OS X. The techniques we developed allowed us to reduce the deployment process to a short process of booting each system from an external hard disk, which then imaged and auto-configured the system. All of these item have been packaged into one disk image (compressed .dmg) download available on our website.

The website can be found at:

http://www.geocenter.com/news/xserve_overview.html

Some of the information is still under development and will be updated soon. Please contact me for more information or any questions.

We are already seeing some pretty impressive results from the cluster and hope to provide some performance numbers in the near future.