With 10.8.2 came a useful fdesetup option for use with FileVault 2 encrypted systems. This new option is called 'authrestart' and it allows you to reboot a FV2-enabled machine and skip the preboot login screen. This provides a mechanism for doing maintenance that requires a reboot.
Along with Server 2.1 came a new setting in Profile Manager. This setting puts the Mac App Store into update-only mode. It grays out all the options except for the update pane. This is great news as we are faced with the prospect of more and more Mac App Store apps that will need to be deployed and updated.
pkgbuild is a tool that showed up in Xcode 3.2 and is now included in default Lion installs. It allows you to make an Apple Package from the command line with a minimum amount of effort. One good use for this tool is creating payload-free packages.
Various Mac Admins have noticed that if you install Flash Player 11.3 using the .pkg file that can be found inside the .app which Adobe provides, System Preferences will crash if you try to use Check Now in the Flash Player PreferencePane.
With the released of Casper Suite 8.6, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is now fully supported. For OTA enrollments to go smoothly on OS X 10.8, the QuickAdd package must be digitally signed with a valid Apple Developer Certificate.
If you didn't catch this PSA from Greg Neagle earlier this month, it is worth a look. Mountain Lion now uses a https url to pull updates from Apple rather than simple a http url.
As discovered by @tvsutton and reported on ##osx-server IRC, the Mac App Store version of Garageband's assets (which are downloaded on first-launch, all 1.57GBs...) can be fetched in advance: This makes it easier to deploy, since it is a standard package for content found outside of the .app bundle itself.
Even though Server.app on 10.8 Server seems more simplified than prior versions of OS X server, there are features which have been expanded upon and made better. Alerts is one such feature. In the past, what you could get alerts on was somewhat limited, but in 10.8 Server this has been expanded.
Rich Trouton and Peter Bukowinski ran into an odd issue on some of their machines. They would time out while trying to connect to a SMB or AFP share with a known good Username/Pass. The problem? iDisk. The machines would try to connect to iDisk even if the share was an internal-only fileshare.
With OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion came some new Unix commands that are very handy. Among them is pgrep and pkill, which rolls grep into the ps command so you no longer have to pipe ps to grep in order to find a running process.
