• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Migrating Data From The Apple Wiki Server

    “Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment The Apple Wiki Server is sadly going away. I always liked this service. It was thoughtfully designed and looked much nicer than most of the other tools available out there. Sure, you couldn’t write articles offline, write in markdown, or do a lot of other things that I’ve learned to both love and hate from other solutions, but honestly it always felt the most Apple of services in macOS Server because it didn’t have every-single-checkbox. So, I’ll pour a little Jaëger on the ground in memory of the wiki server and…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Using Wikis In macOS Server 5.2

    A wiki is a repository of dynamically created and managed content, or content created or edited by multiple users collaboratively. This article is about using the wiki service in macOS Server 5.2 (the Apple Server app running on 10.12/Sierra). I reference file services with WebDAV because it is a very nice integration piece that I think a lot of people will find pretty beneficial. To get started with the Wiki service, first turn it on. This one isn’t heavily dependent on host names (other than being able to access the server from a browser) or directory services (other than being able to authenticate users, but local accounts are perfectly functional) and…

  • Microsoft Exchange Server

    Managing Role Assignments For Exchange In PowerShell

    When running mailbox exports, move requests, etc in Exchange 201x you might get an error. This is because the Management Role Assignments have changed ever so slightly. In order to provide an account the ability to do certain tasks, you can use the New-ManagementRoleAssignment powershell cmdlet to process a request. To do so, pick a user (in this case the username is kryptedadmin) using the -User option and choose roles to assign (in this case, mailbox, export and import) using the -Role option. The command then looks as follows: New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role "Mailbox Import Export" -User kryptedadmin To see if your roles were properly applied: Get-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role "Mailbox Import Export" |…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Migrating the Wiki Service in Mac OS X Server

    Lion brings with it a few challenges for administrators. One such is migrating the wiki service into the new format. When doing an upgrade in place, the Wiki service is pretty straight forward to upgrade, but in many cases, due to aging hardware, wiki services are moving from an older computer to a newer computer. This can be done in one of two ways. The first is to “migrate” the data by copying the Collaboration folder onto the new system. The second is to “export” and “import” the data. I usually recommend doing a migrate where possible, so we’ll start with that method. Note: Before getting started, make sure that…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment,  Network Infrastructure,  Windows Server

    Using the ExtremeZ-IP Command Line

    When you are configuring ExtremeZ-IP as a print server, you will need to set up and configure each printer. However, if you already have setup and configured printer queues for the Windows server, you can import existing queues into ExtremeZ-IP. This can be done programatically via the ExtremeZ-IP EZIPUTIL command line tool. EZIPUTIL has a number of options, whereby the SERVER option is used to configure global settings for ExtremeZ-IP, VOLUME is used to create, edit and delete print queues and PRINT is used to manage shared print queues. Each of the options also has a number of switches for the feature(s) that are being managed. These are structured as…

  • Windows Server

    Exporting Service Settings on Windows Server

    The netsh command can be used to manage network interfaces, control routing and one of the lesser-used features that I’ve seen are to import and export service settings with Windows Servers. This can be especially helpful if you need to normalize data for import into another Windows server or to be normalized for use with another server platform. To export your DHCP information, from a command prompt in Windows you would run the netsh command along with the service you are exporting settings for (WINS, DHCP, etc). After the service identifier you would indicate the action being performed (ie – import or export in this context), followed by a file…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Importing Computers Into DeployStudio

    DeployStudio has the ability to import a csv file that is populated with the MAC address and a few specific settings. This allows you to prepopulate the database with the names that you want each machine to have. If you purchase a lot of machines from Apple then you can get a list of MAC addresses, or, you can use a bar code scanner to scan them as you’re unboxing. If you have a list of MAC addresses (en0), then you will need to format them in a very specific manner. Here, I have included a sample csv file with the data that goes into each field, which I have…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    318 Open Sources mergeSafBookmarks

    Originally Posted to the 318 TechJournal: 318 has open sourced our mergeSafBookmarks python script. This tool can read in a pair of property lists and merge them into a single resultant bookmarks file for Safari. This takes a lot of the work out of pushing bookmarks to existing users as part of your deployment. You can find it here: http://mergebookmarks.sourceforge.net Note: The script also looks at existing bookmarks and doesn’t merge in duplicates.

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Basic pkcs12 Management with security

    Recently, I did an article for afp548.com where I explained that you can import a pkcs12 file into an 802.1x profile using networksetup. In that type of environment you would be leveraging TLS or TTLS with the Mac OS X client acting as the supplicant and the certificate required to establish authentication with the authenticator. So you need the certificate to get started, but how do you get the pkcs12 and dish it out to clients programatically? We’re going to start out with a new keychain where we’ve imported the certificate into that keychain (or skip this step if you already have a p12 file). First, find the certificate and…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Windows Server

    From Open Directory to Active Directory

    Whether you’re going from Open Directory to Active Directory or from Active Directory to Open Directory, chances are you’ll encounter csvde along the way. Csvde is installed on Windows Server and allows you to interface with Active Directory using csv files. cvsde can import files using the -i switch, followed by the -f switch to indicate the file that you are importing, followed by the path of the file. So if you save a file called toimport.csv to the root of your c drive temporarily you would use the following command to import the objects in the rows of the file: csvde -i -f c:toimport.csv Now, what’s that file need.…