• Mac OS X Server

    Removing 'serveradmin settings' Entries in OS X Server

    I frequently write about adding entries in OS X Servers configuration database using serveradmin. But there are a lot of causes for various symptoms in OS X and trying some post of mine might end up biting you later, if it doesn’t fix your problem and you end up leaving the keys in place in OS X Server. Therefore, let’s look at something I might tell you to do, such as set a mail relay host from serveradmin: serveradmin settings mail:postfix:smtp_auth_relay_dict:smtp_auth_relay_host = mdm.krypted.com Once the setting has been configured, you might want to get rid of it outright. Now, this one happens to be exposed in the GUI, so you…

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

    Directory Services Scripting Changes in Lion

    opendirectoryd Scripting directory services events is one of the most common ways that the OS X community automates post-imaging tasks. As such, there are about as many flavors of directory services scripts are there engineers that know both directory services and have a little scripting experience. In OS X Lion, many aspects of directory services change and bring with them new techniques for automation. The biggest change is the move from DirectoryService to opendirectoryd. In Snow Leopard and below, when you performed certain tasks, you restarted the directory services daemon, DirectoryService. The same is true in Lion, except that instead of doing a killall on DirectoryService, you do it on…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Big Changes in Lion Server

    OK, by now I’m sure everyone has heard that OS X Server is a download off the App Store. For a whoppin’ $50 you get the OS that was once called “Open Source Made Easy” until someone at Apple realized that GPLv3 might mean that Open Source doesn’t always mean “free as in beer”. Wait, did I say that out loud? Point is, there are bigger changes here than just moving the server to the App Store. There are also some pretty big changes to the GUI of OS X Server. The first and most obvious is the LoginWindow, which is different in OS X in general. It obviously looks…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Querying ldapsearch

    Need to perform lookups on Open Directory from Linux? Need to determine a search base to use an LDAP plug-in for a third party with Active Directory? Determining the layout of a directory service can be important for a number of tasks. Most of these have to do with connecting systems of different platforms with one another. In OS X, there are a number of tools that will look up directory service information. Most are based on ldapsearch. Using ldapsearch, you can determine whether a search base is good, whether a directory service responds to a given request and validate some assumptions you may have about an LDAP environment. Let’s…