Quicktime Streaming Server is not often talked about as one of the *big* features of OS X Server, but if you need to stream audio or video content it’s hard to beat. We’re going to take a look at setting up QTSS, the options available for broadcasting your live or pre-recorded content, and how to deploy a highly scalable, redundant solution using a load balancer to ensure performance levels.

Keeping logs of all your traffic

Although we’ve mentioned AWStats a number of times before, we’ve never really gotten into how to set it up. While this isn’t exceptionally hard, it’s nice to have someone go there before you if it’s your first time out. So, here’s a rundown of installing AWStats on OS X Server 10.4.

Take special note of step 16 which tells you to create a web realm for your AWStats install. Otherwise you stand a good chance of getting bitten by some of the AWStats exploits that crop up from time to time. The Apple documentation on this should make it quite easy for you to set up the realm.

Ed. Note: We’ve talked about redirecting parts of your home folder a number of times when dealing with AFP, but I don’t think we’ve ever actually laid out how to do it. This collection of scripts makes it easy.

If you manage an environment with lots of network home directory usage, then you need to check out Network Home Redirector. Most, if not all, of us have dealt with the thousands/millions of cache files that can hurt AFP performance on servers when utilizing network homes. Additionally, MS Office and the large chunks of data that it relocates can cause headaches. Jeff Ochsner has put together these redirection scripts and packaged them up for easy deployment.

This might be your new best friend. Be sure to read the ReadMe on Jeff’s site.

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 Wed Sept 27th from 6PM-8PM.

This bi-monthly 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. Topics to be touched upon this month will be Mastering images, NetBoot, NetRestore, and automation of imaging.

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

If you’re planning to go – and we are – you may want to sign up this week as the early registration savings end today!

If you’re thinking of going – and you should – the best we can tell you is that there’s great people teaching (Schoun Regan, Scott Neal, Bill Wiecking, Phil Rinehart (MacEnterprise), great topics (Directory Services Integration, OS X Server/Xserve, Large Scale WiFi, Admin Skills, Security) and it’s in a cool location (right on Monterey Bay).

It will be a good gathering – hope to meet you there.
For more information and registration go to www.macnetworkersretreat.com

So a while ago we put together an article on tuning your AFP server for OS X Server.

I’d been promising part #2 for a while, just to cover some odds and ends, but there has been a major development which made a lot of that work redundant, namely the release of the Universal version of OS X Server 10.4.7.

Read on for some perhaps surprising results…

No article I could find on the web touches the “PostgreSQL-PAM” topic specifically for Mac OS X users, so I decided to put all the pieces together. Thanks to Adrian Nida for the excellent article that provided the basic guidelines for configuring PAM.

Port Trunking, Trunked Ethernet and Bonded Interfaces are some of the terms that get thrown around for what is more commonly known as 802.3ad. In both Apple’s documentation and more generally accepted is the term Link Aggregation, or Link Aggregate Group (LAG) which is perhaps a more visual description of what is really going on here – an aggregate of network interfaces which allow you to beef up the total bandwidth to your server with little to no further cable or networking hardware changes.

Read on for more…

BixData: Powerful easy to use monitoring

BixData is a handy new tool for SysAdmins. It can monitor everything that your network and systems depend on. After a simple installation you can monitor network devices, HTTP, Web Services, Mail Servers, File Systems and Applications. Be notified instantly when a service or device goes down or escalate notification based on downtime.

Cross-platform and scales to 1000’s of servers.

There is a free version for monitoring under 30 machines.

In September Apoio will be hosting a 2-day conference for Mac Sysadmins from Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
The Nordic Macintosh System Administrators Meeting 2006 will have sessions on Deploying Apple Technology in IT Centric Markets and will concentrate on WWDC 2006 from a Sysadmin perspective, Scripting – how to chose language and three sessions on case studies of Mac OS X implementations.

Half of the conference time will be devoted to group discussions.

More info at http://macsysadmin.se (In Swedish)