Newbie question: Tiger server to Leopard, but with a hardware migration in the mix

[mattd]

Hello,

I have an older Tiger server, mostly for light web and mail service. It’s time to retire the old hardware, since it won’t be supported under Leopard server, and I’m beginning to plan the migration.

After reviewing the documentation, it appears that the Standard server would be the best fit, especially since it would allow me to backup via Time Machine. I have two gotchas that I have run into — and I could use some good advice on how to best handle:

1) Mail migration: it appears even under a migrate install that OS X Server Leopard requires setup in “Advanced” mode. This is problematic, since I really don’t want the complexity of advanced, I just want to move my mail DB over so my users don’t lose e-mail. Is there a way to do this without dealing with “Advanced” mode?

2) Firewall: I do have the IP firewall configured and running in OS X Server Tiger. I do this principally to keep SSH dictionary attacks out (even though I don’t use the service) — is there a way to deal with this in “Standard” mode? If I read the documentation right, the firewall in OS X Server Leopard only works in “Advanced” mode?

Many thanks for your help on this.

– Matt

[mattd]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. My main reason for looking at a Leopard Server “standard mode” install, other than complexity, was Time Machine. I have Retrospect server today and am extremely frustrated with it and its lack of evolution as Mac OS X as moved forward. I like the “set it and forget” simplicity of Time Machine — and for the functions this server performs, it would be fine.

I heard with 10.5.2 it is now accessible under advanced but the special service daemon that stops and starts things so that a safe backup can occur don’t run. So I’m trying to find a way around this…

– Matt

[luke]

1) One thing you could try is to use IMAP to do this. If you run both servers simultaneously, you can connect to both of them from Mail.app as the postuser, and then drag email across en mass. Of course, you would probably rather jab yourself with a fork than use Mail.app for this, so you could do the same with a perl script and Net::IMAP.

Connecting as the postuser will show all of your users as subfolders (although this isn’t the primary use for the postuser). I usually use the diradmin account as the postuser (just during an install though). To enable it, you have to enable mail for diradmin, plus edit /etc/imapd.conf to define it as the postuser.

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