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. 

Labman will be celebrating it's 11th Year at Northampton Community College on June 7th – 9th, 2010

Labman continues to be a low-key, inexpensive, and friendly conference intended for persons who are involved in the maintenance of computing labs in higher education, K–12, or library facilities. We are looking forward to the continued enhancement of the content shared an presented each year by fellow lab managers.

Please see http://www.labmanconference.org/ for more information.  We have some great events lined up and look forward to seeing old and new faces this year.
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I will quickly note that I have attended 8 LabMan conferences over the years and hosted 1 of them.  I have found them to be both enjoyable and useful while being a fairly "cheap date" – even the one I got to stress out about while hosting 🙂 .  I encourage folks to seriously consider going, especially if you are out on the East Coast.  

Tom "Macintosh Doctor" Johnson

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!  

I know that this isn't completely tested to see if it is a consistent behavior, but I ran into an issue after upgrading a Leopard server to Snow. The server was running mail services utilizing both the standard spool location and an alternate mail store. 

 After the upgrade all seemed to be well, but we shortly discovered that the users who used the alternate mail store didn't have access to their existing mail. The users in the standard location were just fine.

 After poking around I saw that the alternate store contained two sets of user mail directories within the dovecot directory. One was named with the users shortname, ala Cyrus and the other used a GUID, ala Dovecot. Apparently during the upgrade the existing folders were converted to Dovecot format, yet new folders were also made. By renaming the folders with the shortnames to the GUID, proper functionality was restored to the users mailboxes.

 It was a simple fix, but it took some poking to figure it out. Also being new to Dovecot it took me longer than it probably should have to resolve. Hopefully this will save someone else some time. 

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…

GroupLogic is working to bridge the gap between corporate mass archival solutions and Mac OS X. With a new product called ArchiveConnect, the makers of Extreme Z-IP now have a product that provides the ability to fully integrate CommVault's Simpana. This allows you to reduce the required footprint of on-line disk capacity while being able to meet compliance and data retention requirements. Check out their webinar at: http://www.commvault.com/webinars/details.asp?id=1083 

For several months I've been searching for a complete solution that can offer access control, authentication, integrated search indexing of all content and content management itself for a company intranet that can dispense the following to our internal users:

• Training videos, shared contacts, job aid resources and content management
• A PHP based web front end to access our databases of clients, cases, task management, etc.

We're running Leopard Server, Kerberos, LDAP and all that other fun stuff. But we also are a mixed platform environment with remote branch offices running isolated windows domain workgroups, accessing our intranet from across a VPN. (not my doing)

The problem that I'm having is that I cannot find any one great solution, application or API that can integrate our intranet with our LDAP on Leopard Server for authentication on a remote intranet proxy. I don't just want to rely on creating a secured realm, I want something smarter. I also want this solution to be as simple as possible from the end user's perspective and do things like allow local unauthenticated (or kerberos) access from workstations on our LAN or workstations on our site to site VPN, that traffic is trusted and should be able to totally bypass authentication or at least allow authentication to happen in the background.

 Maybe I'm asking for too much in search of a solution but I don't want to make our users re-signon when they want to switch from our database front end to view training materials, or to access webmail, or view the collaboration wiki content. I also don't want users to have to rely on 5 different methods of searching our intranet to find what they're looking for as well.

I figure that for what I want to do, I will have to:

1. Come up with a custom spotlight search API for Apache, that will not only singularly index web content, but integrate database content as well.
2. Figure out how to modify apache to openly serve the site to trusted internal IP addresses or use WebDAV with kerberos single sign-on.
3. Come up with a public web proxy where remote users can authenticate with their LDAP credentials and then access the intranet from remote locations.

So if anybody has a suggestion to accomplish any of this on Leopard Server, or knows of a great resource on how to do any of the following, like: modify the spotlight search plugin for apache, integrate LDAP authentication within a web page, modify apache to only allow certain IP addresses to access a site, use one authentication session ID to access other secured sites, view PDF, word, excel files on a shared volume through a web front end or how to create a remote sign-on proxy. If you have any thoughts on this or know something that would help, let me know.

If you are getting an error "Can't assign requested address" you may have a problem with the mysql port.  I had just moved my server to a MacMini running Mac OS X 10.6 and mysql_connect was giving this error.  Going into the /etc/php.ini file and setting the default port number to 3306 fixed the problem. 

mysql.default_port = 3306

The php.ini file suggests that PHP will select the port by using the $MYSQL_TCP_PORT or the mysql-tcp entry in /etc/services, but in this case it is not so.  /etc/services on my machine has 3306 listed, but it didn't get picked up.

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.