• Mac OS X Server

    Obtain Old Versions of OS X Server

    With Yosemite in beta, it’s worth mentioning that older versions of OS X Server are still available on the app store, if you just know where to look. You can access and purchase other versions using these links: Server 4: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-server/id883878097?mt=12 Server 3: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-server-3.2.2/id714547929?mt=12 Server 2: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/os-x-server-2.2.5/id537441259?mt=12 Server 1: If you already own OS X Lion Server from the app store then you can still access it under Purchases.      

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

    What Changed On My Mac?

    According to Wikipedia, fsevents is an API from Apple that allows applications to register for notifications of changes to a given directory tree. This means that when something changes, an application (or daemon/agent) can see the change and take action or track what happened. For Linux, there’s a similar tool in iNotify. This time of the year, a lot of imaging and packaging is going on at schools and companies around the world. A lot of people are also moving various settings out of images and into either post-flight packages, automations or managed preferences of some sort. In OS X, it’s easy to make a change on a computer and…

  • 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…

  • iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    JAMF Nation User Conference 2012

    JAMF has announced the 2012 rendition of their National User Conference. Having been to two of these, I can say that if you use any JAMF products that it is a great event to attend. It is a lot of very specific information about integrating, mass deploying, mass managing, mass document distributing and mass 3rd partying for Apple products. The National User Conference will be held October 23-25 2012, 8:00 am – 5:00 pm in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota (where all the cool kids live). The venue is one of the best conference spots I’ve seen in the Guthrie theater, overlooking the stone arch bridge. In previous years, there have been announcements,…

  • Active Directory,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Automatically assign admin rights in OS X based on Active Directory group membership

    Thanks to Tedd Kidd for the following article, on automatically managing administrative privileges based on Active Directory groups! This is a quick and easy way to assign any user to the local admin group in OS X based on their group membership in your Active Directory. This should also work with Open Directory or eDirectory groups if your workstations are bound to those directory services. You’ll need to include this code in the workstation login script so that it runs as root but uses the $@ variable to determine the user that is logging in. #!/bin/bash # Set group name to check against groupname=”domain admins” if [ “`/usr/bin/dsmemberutil checkmembership -U…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Changing Roundcube Max Attachment Size in Lion Server by Duong Nguyen

    Thanks to Duong Nguyen for the second user-submitted post on Changing Roundcube Max Attachment Size in Lion Server! By default, Lion Server’s webmail (Roundcube) has a 5MB max attachment size. The max attachment size is read from php’s “upload_max_filesize” and “post_max_size”. We don’t need to edit php.ini because Lion Server created a .htaccess in Roundcube’s directory that overrides php.ini’s settings. Please only do this if you are comfortable with the terminal! I start by SSHing to my server as root (or you can open a root terminal). 1. # cd /usr 2. # cd share 3. # cd webmail 4. # vi .htaccess 5. Use your arrow keys to navigate…