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)

The next MacEnterprise.org webcast, Entourage and Exchange: An overview of cross-platform collaboration with Entourage’s Exchange connectivity, will take place on Tuesday, June 20th 2006. Join Andy Ruff, Program Manager for Entourage of the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft. He will provide an overview of cross-platform collaboration with Entourage’s Exchange connectivity. A case study will also be given by Jeremy Reichman, Senior Desktop Support Analyst from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

See the Webcasts section <http://www.macenterprise.org/webcasts&gt; for more information.

Go to the following web page 5-10 minutes prior to the webcast start time:
<http://webcast.training.apple.com/&gt; The webcast id is "macenterprise" and the passcode for June 2006 is 837772.

This handy little application has been updated to version 1.0.1. The new version improves support for 10.3.5-10.3.9 systems.

The new version can be obtained from www.mazadigital.com, or the usual downloads sites (Version Tracker, MacUpdate)

Well, it was going to be a big shoot-out with all the big names in OSXS Mail solutions, but trawling through them all would have taken far too long and got far too boring. So imagine that the preliminary rounds took place behind close doors and you’re here for the final. We’re going to be pitching the commercial Kerio Mail Server up against free-if-you-don’t-need-all-the-features Zimbra Collaboration suite which comes in 3 flavours (one free, and two paid-for).

Read on for the results…

Sponsored by IronGate Server Management & Consulting, in association with Digital Transitions the innagural OS X Integrators Birds of a Feather gathering is taking place at MaRS Discovery District on College St. at University Ave., Toronto, Canada on Tues June 13th 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.

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

In part 1 of the series, I covered the reasons why you would want to separate a single server into multiple servers. Now we move on to the nitty-gritty: how do you actually accomplish the task?

Goal: Set up a separate server in the DMZ that handles web serving and external mail transport. This will reduce the number of direct connections from the outside to the inside server. External contributors will still connect directly to the internal mail server to pick up their mail via IMAP.

Ed. Note: You can find this article with a bit more graphic flavor at the author’s website.

The next MacEnterprise.org webcast, Apple Remote Desktop 3 and Automator: A match made in heaven, will take place on Tuesday, May 16. Join Nader Nafissi, Product Manager for Apple Remote Desktop, Sal Soghoian, Product Manager for Automator and Steve Hayman, Senior Consulting Engineer for an informative discussion on how you can use Apple Remote Desktop 3 and Automator to automate your routine management tasks. Learn how you can create Automator workflows using the over 30 actions included with Apple Remote Desktop 3 as well as how you can create your own actions.

Read on for more…

A perl script to read individual user spam and ham folders.

After I got Bayes learning to work correctly in SpamAssassin, I wanted a more convenient way for users to mark messages that were incorrectly classified. The Apple recommendation, as I’m sure you know, requires the user to redirect the message to a particular email address, where a nightly script will process it.

Read on for more…

PaperCut Software has just finished their first version of PaperCut NG for OS X Server. The Mac version has all the functionally of the Windows edition including, print quota, print monitoring, shared accounts, release station and rule based filtering of print jobs. The system works by hooking into CUPS.

Details of the Mac version are available at:
http://www.papercut.biz/pcng/mac/

The software is currently in a public preview period and the developers are keen to get feedback from Mac server administrators, particularly those working in schools and higher education.

A bit more information can be found on the developer’s web log.