The most impactful aspect of the changes in OS X Mountain Lion Server at first appears to be the fact that DNS looks totally different in the Server app than it did in Server Admin. For starters, most of the options are gone from the graphical interface and it looks a lot less complicated, meaning that there are indeed fewer options. However, all of the options previously available are still there. And, the service behaves exactly as it did before, down to the automatically created host name when a server is configured and doesn’t have correctly configured forward and reverse DNS records that match the host name of the computer.…
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Using the Software Update Service on Mountain Lion Server
The software patching configuration built into most operating systems is configured to open a box at home, join your network and start using the computer right away. As environments grow from homes to offices and then offices grow into enterprises, at some point software updates and patches need to be managed centrally. Mountain Lion, as with its OS X Server predecessors has a Software Update service. The service in the Server app is known as Software Update and from the command line is known as swupdate. The Software Update service, by default, stores each update in the /var/db/swupd directory. The Software Update servie is actually comprised of three components. The first is an…
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Easy Document Conversion Scripting in OS X & BSD
I recently had an interesting request to convert pdf, .sh, .py, .doc, .docx, rtf and .log files from an OS X Server into html so they could be viewed using the wiki. Mountain Lion server has WebDAV, but the files are spread throughout the system and need to be copied to a central location. Many of which have tags in them that when viewed via html end up getting parsed funny in a browser. It turns out that Apple has a command called textutil, which can convert data from all these formats except pdf (which doesn’t need to be converted ’cause it doesn’t jack files up when viewed in a…
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Setting Up The Messages Service In Mountain Lion Server
iChat Server was sooooo easy to configure. iChat Server is now Messages Server. Both use the open source jabber project as their back-end code base. Lucky us, all Apple did in the latest iteration is change the name of the service in the Server app, leaving the command line effectively untouched. The paths to things serverish have changed. The jabberd binary is now at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/private/var/jabberd and the autobuddy binary is at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/bin/jabber_autobuddy. Given the importance of having multiple binaries that do the same thing, another jabberd binary is also stored at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/libexec/jabberd. Note that the man page says it’s in /etc. But I digress. Setting up the Messages service is simple. Open the…
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Using Time Machine Server in Mountain Lion Server
The Time Machine service in Mountain Lion Server hasn’t changed much from the service in Lion Server. To enable the Time Machine service, open the Server app, click on Time Machine in the SERVICES sidebar. If the service hasn’t been enabled to date, the ON/OFF switch will be in the OFF position and no “Backup destination” will be shown in the Settings pane. Click on the ON button to see a list of volumes to use as a destination for Time Machine backups. This should be large enough to have space for all of the users that can potentially use the Time Machine service hosted on the server. When you…
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iWork Public Beta Goes Bye-Bye Today :: Last Call
I’m sure you’ve heard by now. But just in case you hadn’t logged into iWork.com in awhile or let the to-do lapse, it’s just worth a reminder that iWork Public Beta, the site that you could upload Pages, Numbers and Keynotes to, is being deprecated. The end comes on today. In other words, if you have documents up on the site, you should download them immediately or you won’t be able to come August. Apple has even provided a document explaining how. The service that was being provided by the iWork public beta is replaced by iCloud. Using iCloud, you can sync your documents between all of your devices. When…
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Installing the Mountain Lion Server VPN Server
OS X Server has long had a VPN service that can be run. The server is capable of running the two most commonly used VPN protocols: PPTP and L2TP. The L2TP protocol is always in use, but the server can run both concurrently. You should use L2TP when at all possible. Sure, “All the great themes have been used up and turned into theme parks.” But security is a theme that it never hurts to keep in the forefront of your mind. If you were thinking of exposing the other services in Mountain Lion Server to the Internet without having users connect to a VPN service then you should think…
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Upgrading to Mountain Lion Server
Now that we’ve looked at what you get and what you don’t get in Mountain Lion Server, let’s take a little while to look at what the upgrade path itself looks like. Before we start, let’s just say that upgrading to Mountain Lion Server is probably one of the fastest, easiest and most boring upgrades you’ll ever get to do. And I say this more to the credit of the engineers that made the process so simple. Apparently there are bonuses to your Server just being an app. There is a catch, some of the services are gone. Another catch, you’re gonna’ need to have a system that meets the…
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Encrypting Volumes in OS X Mountain Lion
Encrypting a volume in OS X Mountain Lion couldn’t be easier. In this article, we will look at three ways to encrypt OS X Lion volumes. The reason there are three ways is that booted volumes and non-booted volumes have different methods for enabling encryption. The third way to enable encryption on a volume is to do so through Encrypting Attached Storage For non-boot volumes, just control-click or right-click on them and then click on Encrypt “VOLUMENAME” where the name of the volume is in quotes. When prompted, provide an encryption password for the volume, verify that password and if you so choose, provide a hint. Once the encryption process…
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Disable Shadows on Screencapture in OS X Mountain Lion
The process has changed a little bit in Mountain Lion for disabling shadows on screen shots, sometimes… By default, there’s no com.apple.screencapture manifest, so the first step is to create it with the boolean disable-shadow key set to true. This part is the same as with Lion: defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool TRUE Now check that disable-shadow shows as a 1: defaults read com.apple.screencapture But where it’s a little different is that you previously killed SystemUIServer w/out sudo: killall SystemUIServer SystemUIServer would then open back up and screenshots wouldn’t have shadows. And this still works sometimes. But now, I’ve noticed across the 30 or so systems in my lab that…