Sponsored by IronGate Server Management & Consulting, in association with Digital Transitions the next OS X Integrators Birds of a Feather gathering is taking place at MaRS Discovery District on College St. at University Ave., Toronto, Canada on Tuesday March 20th from 6:30PM-8:30PM.

In this session we’re looking to provide an understanding of how directory services work in general, how directory services are implemented on Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, and how to configure Mac OS X to integrate into an Active Directory setup. We plan to cover Open Directory on OS X Server and integration into an existing Active Directory environment.
This seminar series aims to introduce administrators and technical co-ordinators to real life implementations of OS X and OS X Server, in a wide range of practical situations. Presentations are given by industry experts and/or system administrators, in a format which fosters open discussions and group collaboration.

Registration and more details of the event are available on Apple’s Seminar Website.

I’ve been dealing with a rack-mount KVM that refuses to sync properly with any generation of Xserve on reboot. While reboots aren’t a common occurrence, I had a request to from The Powers That Be to “fix this”.

Since a regular display will sync correctly every time, I do blame the KVM. To me this is a complete non-issue: simply set the KVM to another unit, wait til the Xserve has finished booting, login via ARD and set the desired resolution. However, I still had a request to do something about it.

Read on for how I solved this…

Script to configure client mail settings

So I thought I would post this before I grow too old and forget about it. I have been working on a command line based configuration script for Mail.app, it does some fancy things like create Mail bundles and Package installers for deployment,it still has a couple of bugs so use it wisely. I haven't had time after MacWorld to work on it too much so if you have any bug reports, feel free to post them here as well as code additions. I would like to add some ssl certificate import support.

It's big, it's long, its BASH – enjoy and dont judge me too harshly as I know it needs some work.

Grab the script here.

The afp548.com website will be down for a few hours due to a scheduled software update on Feb. 4'th, starting at around 10 AM UTC. If you have any ideas on specific improvements or noticed any outstanding issues from the previous update, leave them here or email them to filipp at mac dot com.

Thanks

Update: The upgrade will be postponed to Sunday, Feb. 11'th 10 AM UTC. Sorry for the false alarm. :-/

In a small rev., Apple today announced support for 750GB drives in the Xserve RAID – now giving it a massive 10.5 TB capacity. Along with that also came a price drop.

The drives are available as a CTO option – the standard configs are 1TB, 3.5TB and 7TB

Full details are on the Xserve RAID site

I wrote this script for a client for whom I had set up an iChat server last spring. They asked if it would be possible for the server, in addition to its standard functions, to also maintain a buddy group containing all their local accounts (a feature my wife calls a “persistent buddy list”). From their point of view, having such a list would be extremely useful and having it be maintained by the server would guarantee it stayed up to date and accurate without wasting an employee’s time maintaining it. Unfortunately, neither the base Jabber server nor Apple’s modified version of it provide this feature, but it is possible to emulate it by directly modifying the files where the server stores its user information.

The Problem:

While you can bind OS X computers to a Windows Domain, getting access to single sign on AD services in the process, there remains a weak link in that the CUPS smbspool process does not support Kerberos.  So, while you can setup an Active Directory printer (which are even listed in the Printer Setup Utility Browse list) you can’t print to them without getting an Access Denied error.

The Solution… sort of:

First off, thanks to everyone who spoke and attended at Macworld. The MacIT sessions were well attended and I heard several positive comments throughout the week. We’d like to hear your comments and feedback on the sessions so we’ve setup an email address for just that. Email us at [email protected] with your likes, dislikes, and what we can do to improve your skill set next year (what you’d like to see).

Already on the topic list is the MacIT Kickoff, which centered around Apple’s support of it’s products (both hardware and software) and opened a dialog between many attendees as to the best way to file bug reports, report hardware issues, and learn about support. Two major items seem to rise above the rest: Apple needs to do a better job of letting IT admins know about support options and IT admins who currently don’t use Bug Reporter should do so.The best attended track was the Imaging and Deployment track, so my thanks go out to the team at MacEnterprise and guest speakers who made that track so compelling.

So let’s hear your comments!

There’s been a fair amount of discussion recently regarding filename renaming, and while this is indeed one of those things that there are as many ways to do as there are to skin a cat, here’s an example of one way, with a bit of explanation as to how you can customize to suit your own needs.

These are the final slides from James Turner, of CRYPTOCard, and Andrina’s presentation at Macworld 2007.

In the near future we’re going to try and re-do the demos in Quicktime with commentary to go along with these slides.

You can download the slides in PDF format here.