Archive for category: Articles

If you're not familiar with the Pymacadmin project – you should be.  Nigel Kersten and Chris Adams have created an awesome tool called crankd that will let you execute Python code or shell scripts in response to system events.

What does this mean to you?

Do you have laptop users that are bound to OD or AD?  Do they ever leave your network and get the spinning beachball as their computers try to authenticate or otherwise contact your LDAP servers?  Crankd can sense a network change, which will allow you to write code that removes search paths when your users are OFF your network, and add those search paths when your users RETURN to your network.  Awesome.

Do you have users that VPN to your corporate network?  Crankd will let you execute code to kill and resume the VPN when the computer sleeps or wakes.

Maybe you use a Configuration Management System like Chef or Puppet and you would like laptops to check in with your CMS when they connect to the network (think of laptop carts in education or infrequently used laptops elsewhere).  Crankd can make this happen.

All these problems can be solved by implementing and tweaking crankd.  It's not terribly difficult, and I wrote an article that shows you how to do it here.

A new release of libsrvrmgrd-osx is out which now includes Nagios plugins to monitor and restart (in the event of failure) the following services:

• AFP
• DHCP
• Directory Services
• DNS
• FTP
• Jabber
• Mail
• MySQL
• NAT
• Netboot
• NFS
• Print
• Quicktime Streaming Server
• SMB/CIFS
• Software Update
• Web

 There is basic installation instructions available at the main website, when used in combination with the excellent guide by Gary Larizza it should hopefully be fairly straight forward to install. Any comments, suggestions or bugs would be very welcome.

Whether you're a Mac Developer or Systems Admin, you've probably had to package up a bundle of files for deployment onto a number of machines.  There are many ways to do this with just as many software options; it's easy to get confused and make some simple mistakes.  The current trend away from deploying software into a monolithic "Golden Master" image and toward a modular package-based approach is pushing (or SHOULD BE pushing) Devs and DevOps folk to rethink the way they package. You can't automatically assume that a package will always be installed interactively on the boot volume through the GUI (could you ever really?), but that still doesn't stop certain developers from doing so.

Read on for more… 

Well, everybody seems to be asking why the iPad can’t print files, yet.

If you are looking for iPad printing solutions, you might have come across funny approaches like this one, but this article is about a serious solution.

 I wrote a little article, in which I explain how to use Mac OS X Server's mail services to provide printing services for the iPad.

You can find it here: http://www.andre-aulich.de/en/perm/ipad-printing-–-send-pdf-as-email-to-mac-os-x-server-10-6

Enjoy reading,

 André Aulich 

Some tips on where the certificates you've set up with Server Admin are hiding on your system and the differences between 10.5 and 10.6 in this regard.

Read on for where everything lives an what to do about it… 

Migrating 10.5 iCal Server to 10.6 with group calendars

In Mac OS X 10.5 Server, user and group calendars were available in iCal server.  User calendars worked pretty well, but group calendars were a bit of a kludge.  The biggest mess was the web calendar.  I’m glad to say a lot of this has been vastly improved in 10.6 server. Read on to find out about my migration journey and the numerous bumps in the road. 

For those who haven't tried it, Nagios is quite a cool monitoring package that will run on UNIX (Ed. There fixed that!) variants, including OS X Server.  John C. Welch wrote up an article on setting up Nagios with a Leopard Server which was my inspiration.  While running Nagios, you quickly find that the Plugin system of adding commands to communicate with servers, switches, and all SNMP-speaking devices is…well…awesome. It would be cool if there was a way to pull information out of your Server Admin-managed services and monitor it with Nagios.  I wrote up a small Google Doc on how to do just that.

 Using Felim Whiteley's libsrvrmgrd-osx package, you can pull a wealth of information out of Server Admin over port 311 on a machine running OS X Server the least of which is whether or not a service is running.

 The document is here https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AaQfhLeDuWNcZGNibTU2ODNfNTFjYnF6bjZucg&hl=en and I welcome all comments and suggestions!  

DNS can always bite you in the rear. in some case you run your own DNS server and you can correct the issues. In other cases, you're beholden to the powers that be to determine your fate. All is not lost, however, it is possible to run your own DNS proxy to override specific answers. It's not an ideal solution, and can certainly be accused of being a "hack" but it can be invaluable in some situations.

Read on for how to do this…

I may have found a temporary solution to allow the Apple Software Update Service (ASUS) to work through a corporate proxy server. Adding the following lines to the

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.swupdate.sync.plist

seems to have resolved the issue for now, but Apple needs to deal with this properly (using the system defined proxy settings).

Stop the ASUS service and change the lines (back up the file first to a dir outside of this path), then start the ASUS service.

     <key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
     <dict>
             <key>http_proxy</key>
             <string>http://proxy.mycompany.com:8080</string>
     </dict>
</dict>
</plist>

note: the last two lines are already there; I show them so you can see where I put the lines I added.

This article is the outgrowth of some work I did for a customer in recent weeks.  Big companies are buying iPhones by the truckload to use in their architecture.  These same companies have enough employees to make centralized iPhone activation a little unrealistic.  Throw in a heterogeneous OS client environment and, well, system administrators want to know i) how to deploy iTunes for Windows so their users can activate their iPhones themselves and ii) how to enforce pre-configured parental controls on iTunes for Windows.