• Mac OS X Server

    Setting Up And Using Web Services in OS X Mavericks Server

    Web Services in Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Linux and most versions of Unix are provided by Apache, an Open Source project that much of the Internet owes its origins to. Apache owes its name to the fact that it’s “a patchy” service. These patches are often mods, or modules. Configuring web services is as easy in OS X Mavericks Server (10.9) as it has ever been. To set up the default web portal, simply open the Server app, click on the Websites service and click on the ON button. After a time, the service will start. Once running, click on the View Server Website link at the bottom…

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

    Backing Up and Reindexing The Profile Manager Database in Lion Server

    A common task when scaling databases is to reindex tables within the database. This process makes lookups faster and databases run butter. Reindexing becomes a pretty easy step before or after backing up the database as a general housekeeping step. To backup the database, you’ll use the pg_dump command, defining the user with -U and then the database with -d. In the case of Profile Manager, the database is device_management. Given that data is distributed across a lot of tables in the device_management database, the below script will backup the device_management database and then reindex each of the tables. If you follow previous articles to enable the Postgres user, you…

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

    Working with Postgres from the Command Line in Lion Server

    Mac OS X Server 10.7, Lion Server, comes with a few substantial back-end changes. One of these is the move from SQLite3 to PostgreSQL for many of the back-end databases, including Wiki and Podcast Producer (collab), Webmail (roundcubemail), iCal Server and Address Book Server (caldav) and as the back-end to the newest service in Lion Server, Profile Manager (device_management). As such, it’s now important to be able to use PostgreSQL the way we once used SQLite3, when trying to augment the data that these databases contains, as there currently aren’t a lot of options for editing this data (aside from manually of course). Postgres has a number of commands that…

  • Mac OS X

    Daylite 3.9

    Daylite 3.9 is actually a fairly substantial update from 3.8. This mainly stems from the fact that 3.9 uses PostgreSQL rather than OpenBase, and it runs Postgres on a dedicated server (not that this increases complexity too much as it’s going to discover those databases using Bonjour). This gives the application speed and the developers a number of new options they hadn’t had before. The MarketCircle developers will likely be able to come to market with new changes faster, thus being able to make you more productive with your productivity app. Also expect more 3rd party developers. Why? Because PostgreSQL is way more popular than OpenBase, is flexible for exchanging…