Archive for category: Tips

Poor Man\’s Video Substitute

If you ordered an X-Server without a video card, but need one here’s a down-n-dirty tip:

If you have an old B&W PowerMac lying around, swipe the video card from it and use it in the upper slot. It works fine, won’t void your warranty and gives you the basic functionality you need to manage the beastie!

Ed. Note: I think most Apple PCI video cards, note not AGP, should work in the Xserve, but nice to know of a specific example. Having said that….running it headless isn’t hard to do, either.

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Access keychains from the CLI

Use the security command to access keychains.

Read the man page, but usage is pretty easy. It’s especially handy when you need to find out your IPSec shared key and you only have an ssh connection.

Do note that if you use the interactive mode that there isn’t any way of getting out besides using control-c.

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BDB Utilities

The Berkeley DB tools that should have come with the OS

Michael Bartosh has a pkg installer for the Berkeley DB utilities that are necessary to roll your Cyrus and OpenLDAP transaction logs in addition to performing other housekeeping chores for any bdb database.

Check out the rest of his site for other OS X Server news and downloads.

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Setting Screen Effects Defaults for Mass-Imaging

Not quite OS X Server, but since most of us do some kind of imaging…

Check out this command:

sudo pico /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/EngineDefaults.plist

This command is on one line, remember.

Does anyone know of other defaults this concept hold true for? (This determines what settings are used for "ByHost" plists, which are used by OS X to reset certain preferences after imaging).

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Single Sign On for AFP using AD

How to kerberize your OS X Server when using AD for authentication.

I was going to write up my own, but Michael has done a great job of documenting all this and there’s nothing I can add. For what it’s worth I prefer the Unix-centric method halfway down the page.

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***WIP*** cyradm Shared Folders syntax

I’ll incorporate this into the other article.

I had a deal of trouble with cyradm after installing it – things simply would not work as I wished (though the install was easy).

I wanted shared folders for employees at my client’s office, but couldn’t seem to hack out a shared folder in Other\ Users/ – then, while digging through the advanced config for Mozilla Thunderbird, I got it…

cyradm -u [usernam] [fqdn]
– here i entered my password as prompted-
localhost>cm Shared\ Folders/Spam
localhost>sam Shared\ Folders/Spam lrswip

(the order of the acl flags seems to matter)

(also, the master "Shared" Folder must be named "Shared\ Folder" – the \ escapes out the space in the name…)

bcirvin/

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Learn How to Use Your Xserve RAID Card Before You Get It

Had an Xserve with the RAID card on order since before time began?

As of 10.3.5 you can take a look at man megaraid or at Apple’s RAID card docs and learn how to use it before it comes.

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How to Build a RAID Mirror Without a Re-Format

Ever wished that you had setup your Mac OS X Server with a boot RAID before you installed everything? Afraid that making a RAID mirror now will require you to backup, format, and restore?

Read on to see how to create a RAID mirror without formatting your drive.

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SquirrelMail Sends, But Does Not Return User to Inbox

I’ve noticed at times that although I can send mail in SquirrelMail on OSXS, I can’t see any visible sign that the mail went out – I don’t get redirected to the Inbox, and can only see that I’ve sent mail if I look at the Sent mailbox…

Check out KB#107982 for the fix.

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Adding your own header filter to sieve

I recently came up with the idea of using sieve scripts that I installed using Joel’s article to filter my spam. I work for a University that filters all mail that comes to our site mail server through spamassassin. Messages that they suspect are spam get marked with the header X-SPAM-Level: and a number of stars. This header was unavailable in the sieve plugin of squirrelmail. I found that under /usr/share/squirelmail/plugins/avelsieve/config.php there is an array that holds the values of the headers you can use. I added my specific header in, saved it, went back to squirrelmail, applied it, and everything worked great. I sent a faked out test message with a spam level that I specified and it bounced back with the message “I don’t like SPAM!” so I know it worked.
You will want to search for something looking like this in your config.php file.

/* Headers to display in listbox widget, when adding a new header rule. */

$headers = array(
'From', 'To', 'Cc', 'Bcc', 'Subject', 'Reply-To', 'Sender', 'List-Id',
'MailingList', 'X-ML-Name', 'X-List', 'X-Mailer', 'X-MailingList',
'X-Mailing-List', 'X-Spam-Flag', 'X-Spam-Status', 'X-Spam-Level', 'X-Priority', 'Importance',
'X-MSMail-Priority', 'Precedence');

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