• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Configuring Mountain Lion Server's Contacts Server

    Mountain Lion has an application called Contacts. Mountain Lion Server has a service called Contacts. While the names might imply differently, surprisingly the two are designed to work with one another. The Contacts service was called Address Book in Lion and below and is based on CardDAV, a protocol for storing contact information on the web, retrievable and digestible by client computers. The Contacts service is also a conduit with which to read information from LDAP and display that information in the Contacts client, which is in a way similar to how the Global Address List (GAL) works in Microsoft Exchange. I know I’ve said this about other services in…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Using OpenSSL to Test Connectivity

    When you’re testing connectivity to servers and you’re using SSL on those servers then your traditional ways of testing connectivity may been a little augmentation. For starters, you’re going to use the openssl to test connections. For example, if you have a web server you might traditionally attempt to telnet into port 80 and check you banners; however, if you have an SSL certificate on it then you might be better served connecting to port 443 using the openssl command. In the following example we’ll tell openssl to be a generic client (s_client)  and connect (-connect) to https://krypted.com/ over port 443: openssl s_client -connect krypted.com:443 The output would then look…