• Mac OS X Server

    DIsable Insecure Passwords in 10.4 Server

    April 4, 2005

    You can use the NeST command to control which protocols that Open Directory uses in Mac OS X 10.4 server. To do so you’re going to use the -setprotocols option from the command line, followed by the protocols you would like to disable and then the off string. For example, the following would disable APOP: NeST -setprotocols APOP off The following would then reenable it: NeST -setprotocols APOP on

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  • Mac OS X Server,  Xsan

    Xserve RAID: Reset Controller

    April 2, 2005

    Unmount any Xserve RAID volumes hosted by the RAID (especially Xsan volumes).  Press the reset button  on the back of the controller module for about ten seconds.  You should see the controller restart and then the controller should be reset.  Sometimes you need to reset both controllers.  You don’t have to reset the whole controller to just reset the password.  To do that, you can press the reset button for about 1-2 seconds and then try to authenticate through RAID Admin to reset the password.  By default the password to view the Xserve RAID, once reset is public and to edit settings, the default password is private.  By default the IP…

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  • Mac OS X Server

    List All Groups With NetInfo from 10.3

    March 8, 2005

    The nireport command can be used to list all of the groups in a NetInfo structure. To use nireport, you will need to specify the domain and a directory (in that order). Optionally, you can also specify a timeout for the query (-T) and whether or not the domain should be treated as tagged (-t). So if your NetInfo domain were local then the following would show all of the groups in a 10.3 Server-based Open Directory: nireport . /groups The equivalent in 10.4 and up would then be: dscl . -list /Groups Or for users: dscl . -list /Users To then show all of the users in a group…

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

    Reset the Admin or Root Password in Mac OS X

    February 22, 2005

    Forgot the admin password in Mac OS X? Well, Apple let’s you boot computers into what is known as Single User Mode. To boot a Mac into Single User Mode, boot the machine holding down Command-S. Once the system boots up, you should see a command prompt. Here, run fsck: fsck -fy Then mount the file system: mount -uw / Then reset the password using the passed command passwd <username> For example, if the user is root: passwd root When prompted, provide the desired administrative password.

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  • Mac OS X Server

    Reconfigure Xinetd to Eliminate FTP Wait in 10.3 Server

    February 17, 2005

    Tthe FTP service uses RFC 931 for user identification, which isn’t supported in Mac OS X (why we’ll move on to other FTP servers in the future). To resolve, add the -I option in the xinetd configuration as you see here: service ftp { disable = no instances       = 100 socket_type     = stream wait            = no user            = root server          = /usr/libexec/xftpd server_args     = -aI groups          = yes }

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