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

    Upgrading to Mountain Lion Server

    Now that we’ve looked at what you get and what you don’t get in Mountain Lion Server, let’s take a little while to look at what the upgrade path itself looks like. Before we start, let’s just say that upgrading to Mountain Lion Server is probably one of the fastest, easiest and most boring upgrades you’ll ever get to do. And I say this more to the credit of the engineers that made the process so simple. Apparently there are bonuses to your Server just being an app. There is a catch, some of the services are gone. Another catch, you’re gonna’ need to have a system that meets the…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Snow Leopard Server & Adaptive Firewalls

    The term Adaptive Firewall can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. In Mac OS X Server it means that if you attempt to logon with an inappropriate password 10 times that a dynamic rule will be created blocking access for the computer that access was attempted from for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes the dynamic rule will be removed from the server. To see the number of Dynamic Rules running on a server, look at the Firewall services Overview tab, or Active Rules. There’s not a timer but it’s pretty easy to see which IPs are blocked. I’ve found it doesn’t always clear out after 15…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    Mac OS X Server 10.5: Using NATd to turn the Server into a Router

    There are certain aspects of Mac OS X Server that it just isn’t that great at.  One of them is acting as a router.  It’s just a fact that an appliance by SonicWALL, Cisco, Watchguard and sometimes LinkSys will run circles around the speed and feature set of Mac OS X Server.  So with that in mind, let’s look at how you would go about configuring a basic port forward on OS X Server if you decided not to listen to me on this point…  😉 You can use the /etc/net/natd.plist.  The key you’ll want to edit is the redirect_port, one per port or a range of all in one key… …

  • Xsan

    Preventing Firewall Issues with Xsan

    I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal Introduction Xsan requires a dedicated ethernet network in the supported architecture by Apple. For systems that are obtaining directory information or need to be wired into the corporate network of many organizations this can cause issues. Namely that Xsan will attempt to use the corporate network for connectivity with clients. We see this in many configurations and it can cause dropped packets, unmountable volumes and other intermittent issues. One way to fix this for metadata controllers is to choose the network adapter that you would like to use on the metadata network in Server Admin. This can be done by: Open Xsan Admin Click…