“Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.” ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment The Apple Wiki Server is sadly going away. I always liked this service. It was thoughtfully designed and looked much nicer than most of the other tools available out there. Sure, you couldn’t write articles offline, write in markdown, or do a lot of other things that I’ve learned to both love and hate from other solutions, but honestly it always felt the most Apple of services in macOS Server because it didn’t have every-single-checkbox. So, I’ll pour a little Jaëger on the ground in memory of the wiki server and…
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Enable SMB Sharing For Specified Users In macOS
In this article, I looked at enabling SMB and AFP shares via the command line for macOS: Setup the File Sharing Service in macOS 10.13, High Sierra One thing I din’t cover is enabling SMB sharing for a specific user. This is different as passwords need to be stored in an SMB hash. And you can set that hash type with the pwpolicy command. So to do so, we’ll run the command with the -u option so we can supply the username, the -sethashtypes followed by SMB-NT as the hashtype followed by “on” as can be seen here: pwpolicy -u charles.edge -sethashtypes SMB-NT on The interpreter then asks for a…
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macOS Server Changes Coming Soon To A Server Near You
Many of the people that read my articles undoubtedly arleady know this, but Apple has announced a sharp reduction in the number of services provided. Per this article, the Calendar, Contacts, DHCP, DNS, Mail, Messages, NetInstall, VPN, Websites, and Wiki services are being deprecated and Apple has provided a few services, per service, that they recommend moving to. Those services, per the above article, include the following: Calendar Calendar and Contacts Server DavMail Radicale Contacts Calendar and Contacts Server DavMail Citadel DHCP Kea Dnsmasq FreeRADIUS DNS BIND Unbound KnotDNS Mail KerioConnect dovecot/Postfix Courier Messages ejabberd Openfire Prosody NetInstall NetSUS BSDPy VPN OpenVPN SoftEther VPN Tcpcrypt Websites Apache HTTP Server Nginx Lighttpd…
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This New Years Day, Learn The Jot Command
This New Years Day, Learn The Jot Command The jot command is one I haven’t used in awhile. But it’s still useful. Let’s take a look at a few of the things you can do with it. First, let’s just print lines into a new file called “century.txt” which we can do by running with the number of increments followed by the starting number, and then redirecting the output into the file name: jot 100 1 > ~/Desktop/century.txt Or to do integers instead, simply put the decimals: jot 100 1.00 > ~/Desktop/century.txt Or in descending order, jot – 100 1 > ~/Desktop/century.txt Now we could change the output to be…
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Check the EFI Version of a Mac
I’d written an efi version checker. But the lovely Andrew Seago texted me one that’s better than mine. So I present it here: current_efi_version=`/usr/libexec/efiupdater | grep "Raw" | cut -d ':' -f2 | sed 's/ //'` echo "current_efi_version $current_efi_version" latest_efi_version=`ls -La /usr/libexec/firmwarecheckers/eficheck/EFIAllowListShipping.bundle/allowlists/ | grep "$current_efi_version"` echo "latest_efi_version $latest_efi_version" if [ "$latest_efi_version" == "" ]; then echo "EFI FAILED" exit 1 else echo "EFI PASSED" exit 0 fi
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Setup The Caching Service On macOS High Sierra
High Sierra sees the Caching service moved out of macOS Server and into the client macOS. This means administrators no longer need to run the Server app on caching servers. Given the fact that the Caching service only stores volatile data easily recreated by caching updates again, there’s no need to back the service up, and it doesn’t interact with users or groups, so it’s easily divested from the rest of the Server services. And the setup of the Caching service has never been easier. To do so, first open System Preferences and click on the Sharing System Preferences pane. From here, click on the checkbox for Content Caching to…
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Demote an Open Directory Server using the Server app
macOS Server 5.4 running on High Sierra can have problems with Open Directory. Sometimes, you just need to reset your directory service. You can demote and restore the server if needed. But buyer beware, you may end up screwing things up while the directory server is being demoted and you’re restoring a backup. Or if you haven’t built out the directory server, you may end up just demoting the server and starting over. In this article, we’ll look at demoting the server. Note: If you demote the service, and you don’t have a replica, you will destroy all users and groups. To get started demoting the Open Directory master, first open the…
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Getting Help With Server 5.4
macOS Server 5.4, running on High Sierra, comes complete with lots of awesome features. And these features are made easier with some documentation to help you get up and running, started and owning the configuration of Apple Servers. One such is the built-in options to help manage your servers. Open Server, click Help, then click Server Help. You can then search and browse for information about things you’d like to accomplish using the Help Center. Now, click the arrow for each service for information about configuring that service. And just like that, simple and easy-to-use documentation, available live on macOS Server, guiding you to accessing the features you need. You…
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Install macOS Server 5.4 On A Mac Running macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)
The first thing you’ll want to do on any server is setup the networking for the computer. To do this, open the System Preferences and click on Network. You usually want to use a wired Ethernet connection on a server, but in this case we’ll be using Wi-Fi. Here, click on the Wi-Fi interface and then click on the Advanced… button. At the setup screen for the interface, provide a good static IP address. Your network administrator can provide this fairly easily. Here, make sure you have an IP address and a subnet mask. Since we need to install the Server app from the Mac App Store, and that’s on the Internet,…
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Backup the Settings on macOS Server 5.4 Running on High Sierra
In past versions of this guide, I covered Time Machine Server. Here, we’re going to look at backing up the settings of a macOS Server using Bender. To do so, we’re going to install a little app called Bender from the great folks at Robot Cloud. You can download that from http://robotcloud.screenstepslive.com/s/2459/m/5322/l/94467-bender-automated-backup-of-os-x-server-settings. Once downloaded, run the package installer. At the Welcome to Bender screen, click Continue. Agree to the licensing agreement by clicking the Continue button. Click Agree again (assuming of course that you agree to the license). Choose who you wish to install the software for and click Continue. I’d go ahead and install Bender at the default location,…