Update: The dates are now 6/27-29 in Austin.

Apple has a new training class coming out that deals with Advanced Server Administration.

I’m proud to have done some work during the development of the class, and happy to say that it includes material from my Panther book that has been updated for Tiger (specifically, Part I). I encourage you to look into attending the beta in Austin, TX.

This class represents a unique cooperation between O’Reilly and Apple. It’s success or failure will likely determine how long that cooperation lasts. As I’ve mentioned before, O’Reilly is very skeptical of the viability of the IT Centric Mac markets. So I urge you all to look into this class and, if it’s worthy, attend the class or buy the materials.

Some thoughts on getting a small office network setup.

Read on for the beginning of a four part series on configuring some basic connectivity on your server.

The first Apple announcement at NAB 2006 is the release of Xsan 1.3 – the biggest improvement being the ability to use LUNs greater than 2TB, removing the need to slice your 7TB RAIDs. Read on for the other improvments…

Filling in the holes where the system lags a bit, here’s a quick way to get e-mail quota warnings out to your users

So I got bitten this morning by a user who hit their IMAP quota limit and didn’t get any alerts from Mail.app about it, possibly because he reckoned he hadn’t quit Mail.app or logged out of his machine for about a month…

This led me to whip up this PHP script this morning. PHP has kind of become my command line scripting language of choice, mainly because I often find myself needing to read SQL data for one reason or another, it’s installed on all OS X machines, and has a reasonable API for things like sending email.

Yes, it’s here! With new features including remote Spotlight searches, remote drag and drop, shared clipboards, curtain mode, Automator actions, a task server and smart computer lists there’s a veritable feast of stuff to get excited about. Check out the new Apple Remote Desktop page.

As of 10.4.6, if you’ve got a GPT partitioned disk, you can use diskutil from the command line to resize volumes…

nigelkersten@zombie: ~ $ diskutil resizeVolume
Disk Utility Tool
Usage:  diskutil resizeVolume [Mount Point|Disk Identifier|Device Node] size
        <part1Format part1Name part1Size> <part2Format part2Name part2Size> ...
Non-destructively resize a disk. You may increase or decrease its size.
When decreasing size, you may optionally supply a list of new partitions to create.
Ownership of the affected disk is required.
Valid partition sizes are in the format of <number><size>.
Valid sizes are B(ytes), K(ilobytes), M(egabytes), G(igabytes), T(erabytes)
Example: 10G (10 gigabytes), 4.23T (4.23 terabytes), 5M (5 megabytes)
resizeVolume is only supported on GPT media with a Journaled HFS+ filesystem.
A size of "limits" will print the range of valid values for the current filesystem.
Example: diskutil resizeVolume disk1s3  10G
         JHFS+ HDX1 5G MS-DOS HDX2 5G
Valid filesystems: "Case-sensitive HFS+" "Journaled HFS+" "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" 
"HFS+" "HFS" "MS-DOS FAT32"  "MS-DOS FAT16" "MS-DOS" "MS-DOS FAT12" "UFS" "Linux" "Swap" 

If you are using the Server Admin GUI to update/replace an expiring certificate (say, from Verisign) with a newer one that has the same hostname/common name, here is tip so you don’t get stumped:

When looking to replace/update a certificate, you’ll need to delete the existing certificate before importing the newer one (using Server Admin is fine for that).

If you attempt to import the newer certificate an incorrect error dialog appears saying that the certificate data/passphrase may be wrong and to double check it.

The error dialog is wrong.

It should alert you that a certificate with the same hostname/common name already exists on the server and you’ll need to remove it before importing the current one (yes, bugs have been filed with Apple already).

The only tip off as to the real issue is in the system.log which reports an error from the server manager deamon stating a certificate with the same identity already exists.

Enjoy!

Lab Admins Unite!

LabMan is a low-key, inexpensive, and friendly conference intended for people who manage, supervise or maintain computing labs in higher education, K-12, or library facilities regardless of platform or technology they maintain. That said, it does indeed have long running and strong Mac presence.

This year it runs from June 6-7 at Purdue University in Indiana. More info at the conference page.

So, it’s not exactly server related, but it’s worth mentioning. Today Apple have released the public beta of Boot Camp – a piece of software to simplify the install of Windows XP SP2 on your Intel-based Mac. Check out its page for more details, including System Requirements and limitations (no support for IR, Bluetooth Keyboard/mouse, built-in iSight, sudden motion sensor and the ambient light sensor).

From looking at the mailing lists and discussion boards, you’ll see that a reasonable number of people seem to be having problems with their AFP servers under OS X Server 10.4.x, particularly under heavy load with network home directories, and particularly in terms of stability. I used to be one of those people, but the solutions presented in this article have (touch wood) resolved the vast majority of my issues.

Read on for all your AFP tuning needs…