Archive for category: Articles

Summary

You Need a set of Services – ( Mail, File Servers, Web, etc)

You are on a budget, (home use, elementary school, small office)

When you are done – you want to be able to point at something and "know" just what you’ve done and how it "really" is working.

Read on….

Turn your spam into colorful art!

Use amavis-stats and rrdtool to chart out your spam/ham/virus history from your mail logs.

Have you ever wanted or needed to change a user’s password policies from the command line? Read on to find out how pwpolicy can help you manage user’s passwords without Workgroup Manager.

Script to backup both Postfix and Cyrus on OS X Server 10.3

Get the backup script here and read more to find out how to use it.

Log Rolling with periodic

How to get periodic to keep all of your logs tidy.

Is your iDisk a little poky and just not quite big enough?

Build yourself an iDisk locally on your server! Use Backup.app to back up your Mac systems to your own file server. See the detailed Solo .Mac article here.

Ed. Note: While the article walks you through doing this on a FreeBSD box, the methodology will help you to do this on your own server. The biggest sticking point is the DNS, since you’ll need to co-opt the iDisk DNS records. The article has you just stomp on the entire apple.com domain, which is probably a bit ham-fisted. Instead just create a host record in /etc/hosts for the specific address that you want.

Server-side Mail processing for Cyrus

Enables vacation messages and mail filters with OS X Server 10.3.

One of the things that can make rollout plans go much smoother is automation. Through imaging and scripting I recently cut a rollout from 24 steps to 4!

One thing here that can get you is AD binding, as it acts funky when trying to run as a post-restore script or as a startup item. Based on work by Michael Bartosh, I’ve put together a login hook that can do your AD bind and name your Mac on first login.

Heavily commented, you can download the script and take a look to see if it can help you shave steps off of your rollout.

You can download it here.

How to get Squid on another machine to authenticate to an Open Directory LDAP server.

While this example shows how to do this with a Red Hat box, the process is pretty much the same for any Unix/Linux.

This script synchronizes AD group membership with OD group membership.

Use this to better manage MCX settings for AD groups. You can download it here.