Apple recently announced the end of the Apple Xserve. The data center is a funny thing, and being such rack space is critical to most who spend a lot of time there. Many of the previous Xserve customers will continue to buy Mac Pro’s and use them in racks as tall Xserves. Others will purchase Mac Mini’s and use them for certain situations. But many will move on to using the same iron in the data center that they use for everything else, finding a way to duplicate or replace the functionality that was previously in the Xserve with something else. Server Admin is not going to run on Linux.…
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Snow Leopard & Directory.app
If you grew accustomed to using Directory.app in Leopard and you’re thinking about an upgrade to Snow Leopard then you might want to pause, if only for a moment. You see, there is no Directory.app in Snow Leopard. If you were using Directory.app to allow users to create Blogs and Wikis, then check out the new web interface and see if the specific functionality you seek is there; otherwise look into SACLs and consider pushing out Workgroup Manager. If you were using it to hook into LDAP and allow for looking up contact information then check out Address Book Server, included in 10.6 Server…
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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.…
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Integrating Google Apps with Open Directory
Randy Saeks has posted a paper on integrating Open Directory with Google Apps. It’s a nice read and takes a lot of the guessing game out of getting Google Apps to authenticate users based on Open Directory. Many of the steps can also be leveraged to use the GoogleAppsToolkit for LDAP running on other platforms as well.
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Address Book.app and Exchange Contacts
Over the years Apple has slowly been adding Exchange functionality to a number of their products, quietly. While Snow Leopard is reported to add even more functionality there are still a number of things you can do with Exchange from the Mac OS X client. For example, Address Book can pull information from your Exchange contacts. This isn’t to say that every single field will work, but the basics do work – and pretty well. To connect to your Exchange server from Address Book, open the program and then open the Preferences menu. From the General tab check the box for Synchronize with Exchange as seen here: Now click…
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Windows Server: Who Deleted My Frickin' OU?!?!
Well, we knew it was possible, but we didn’t know anyone would actually do it. Based on the title here, you probably already know that someone deleted a whole OU. Given that about 6-7 people could have done it and none were owning up of course you’re gonna’ get forced to figure out who it was. Well, let’s get started then. First, restore the OU. To do this we’re gonna’ use the ldp.exe utility from the Windows Server 2003 Support Tools. THen we’re going to open it up and click on the Connection menu and connect to your DC (and authenticate as a Domain Admin or above of course).…
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Mac OS X Server: slapd arguments
How do I know what arguments were used when launching slapd? the /var/run/slapd.args file
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Kerberos Management with kadmin.local
Kerberos can be managed interactively using kadmin.loca or kadmin (which edits the default realm by default): sudo kadmin.local To see a list of principals: listprincs To remove principals: delprinc user@YOUR.KERBEROS.DOMAIN To add a principal into that database: addprinc user@YOUR.KERBEROS.DOMAIN
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Mac OS X Server 10.5: Self Updating Directory Entries
I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal If you’re migrating to Leopard and Leopard Server then you’ve likely noticed the welcome addition of a new program in /Applications/Utilities called Directory. Directory allows users bound into an Open Directory environment to update LDAP records provided they have access to do so. Using LDAP ACLs it’s possible to give users access to update their own directory information using an LDAP directory browser such as Directory. When you open Directory you should see a listing of all of the directory information that has been created. From here you can create Shared Contacts, Groups, Locations and Resources. Each of these can be connected to a…
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Mac OS X: Trusted Binding
In Directory Access, click Services and authenticate. Then select LDAPv3 in the list of services, then click Configure. Net, select the server configuration of interest, then click Edit. Or click on the plus icon and type in the name of the server and click on Bind. When prompted, enter the name of the computer and the name and password of an LDAP directory domain admin account. Next, click on the OK button bind.