ChronoSync is one of those tools that’s been in the Mac community for a long time (rightfully so). It’s been a little while since I got the chance to really tinker around with ChronoSync so I thought I’d do a little article on what I got to find during my tinkerations. To get started with ChronoSync, go to their website at http://www.econtechnologies.com/chronosync/overview.html. Next, we’re going to walk through the most basic of setups (and you can get all kinds of complicated from there if you’d like!). Once you’ve downloaded, ChronoSync, run the installer from the disk image that was downloaded. Then walk through the installer, basically following the defaults (unless you’d like to…
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- Active Directory, cloud, Consulting, iPhone, Kerio, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment, Microsoft Exchange Server, Network Infrastructure, Windows Server
Dig TTL While Preparing For A Migration
Any time doing a migration of data from one IP to another where that data has a DNS record that points users towards the data, we need to keep the amount of time it takes to repoint the record to a minimum. To see the TTL of a given record, let’s run dig using +trace, +nocmd to turn off showing the version and query options, +noall to turn off display flags, +answer to still show the answer section of my reponse and most importantly for these purposes +ttlid to toggle showing the TTL on. Here, we’ll use these to lookup the TTL for the https://krypted.com/ A record: dig +trace +nocmd…
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Configure the Mail Service in Mavericks Server
Mail is one of the hardest services to manage. Actually, mail is pretty simple in and of itself: there’s protocols people use to access their mail (such as IMAP and POP), protocols used to communicate between mail servers and send mail (SMTP, SMTPS) and then there’s a database of mail and user information. In Mavericks Server, all of these are represented by a single ON button, so it really couldn’t be easier. But then there’s the ecoysystem and the evil spammers. As a systems administrator of a large number of mail servers, I firmly believe that there is a special kind of hell where only spam is served at every…
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Resolving Corrupt journal.db Files in Kerio
Sometimes it seems like sqlite just isn’t equipped for some tasks. Sometimes it seems like some developers aren’t. Sometimes it ends up being a mystery as to what is really going on behind the scenes. Like watching CNN on a television right next to Fox News at the gym. Both can’t be reality. But what is real, is that journabl.db files get corrupt in Kerio all the time. And the logs often say something about SQLITE_CORRUPT &/or “database disk image is malformed”. To correct, first stop the Kerio server, then nuke the .journal.db file. Assuming the mail store is /usr/local/kerio/mailserver/store/mail on a Mac (swap /usr/local with /opt if using Linux)…
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Disabling Attachment Preview In Apple Mail
I recently had a situation where an email had a bunch of corrupt attachments. Each time one of the attachments was clicked on before the Mail app could mark the message as read the Preview of the attachment crashed the application. Turns out this was because opening the email automatically was attempting to display the image preview. Turns out I just needed to disable preview in mail long enough to get the messages deleted. To do so write the DisableInlineAttachmentViewing key as true into com.apple.mail as follows: defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool true To then disable this option, set the key to false: defaults write com.apple.mail DisableInlineAttachmentViewing -bool false
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A Little More About afctl in OS X Server
Awhile back I wrote an article on managing the Adaptive Firewall built into Mountain Lion Server at https://krypted.com//mac-os-x-server/managing-lion-servers-adaptive-firewall-from-the-command-line. It’s worth mentioning that when you use this command you’re basically editing some text files. These include the blacklist, blockedHosts and whitelist folders at possibly the shortest folder at this depth in the file system that I’ve ever had the good luck to need to use /var/db/af (okay, okay, I’m sure we’ve all made /a/b/c and that’s shorter, but this is pretty close). You should use afctl to add and remove machines from these lists. The -w option in afctl used to add a host to a whitelist will cause the host…
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Can't Undo Deletes in Kerio
When you setup a Kerio server, by default there’s a feature called AutoExpunge. This feature keeps mail clients from showing a message with a strikethrough through it when a message is marked for deletion. Once items are processed the message is moved to deleted and the strikethrough message is removed from the folder it was deleted from. Many users can get confused by this, so Kerio built a feature called AutoExpunge. That AutoExpunge feature instead of striking through messages just tosses them. That causes you to be unable to undo a delete. To disable AutoExpunge, stop Kerio Mail Server and then look for AutoExpungeOnDelete option in /usr/local/Kerio/mailserver/mailserver.cfg (I like to back…
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Increasing The Maximum Connections In Kerio Connect
Kerio has a few maximums set by default. There are also a few items that are not in the Kerio Connection Administration page. When using IMAP (and some other services), you can increase the maximum number of allowed connections to allow users to be able to connect to your servers using the variety of devices they likely now have. We’ll look at doing this with IMAP (given that each account accessed by each user is likely using at minimum 2 connections) but you can do this with many other services as well. To increase the total number of available IMAP connections: Open the Kerio Connect Administration page. Click on the…
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Converting pst Files to mbox
Large scale mail migrations can be tricky. There is a shareware app that can be used to migrate pst files from the pst format into mbox, which can then be used with Mac OS X http://www.littlemachines.com. If the migration process needs to be automated (they all seem to at scale) then a script could be written to crawl users, finds the pst files and then convert them. Or it could be done on the client side using a self-destructing launchd item. Conversion syntax for libpst would be something like the following: readpst -o /output/folder /server/path/user.pst Before you can use readpst, it needs to be built via libpst on the system that…
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Using OpenSSL to Test Connectivity
Almost wrote this up again and then realized I already did once (sure it was a few years ago but luckily not much changes with some of the command line stuff). Check it out here: https://krypted.com//mac-os-x/using-openssl-to-test-connectivity If you want to see more on openssl check this one out too: https://krypted.com//unix/openssl-and-signatures