• Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: Cascading Software Update Services

    Software Update Services allow your server to cache updates from Apple and then redistribute them to clients within your organization.  Now, this is going to greatly cut down on the amount of bandwidth consumed when new software patches are released.  But if you have a large distributed organization you might want to have multiple Software Update Servers daisy-chained together in a cascade to download updates from each other and provide updates to sets of clients (maybe they’re geographically separated or you just have too many clients to provide updates to for just one server).  Cascading the Software Update Services would further conserve bandwidth in your environment if you have multiple Software Update…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: AutoFS

    AutoFS is greatly improved in Leopard.  To set up an automounting sharepoint in Leopard, use Server Admin from /Applications/Utilities.   We described how to setup a share point in this article: Mac OS X Server 10.5: Sharing Files the New Way Once you have set up your share point then you may want to make it an automounting share, or you may want it to automount and not be visible for users, as in the case of a home directory automount.  To create the automount you would browse to a folder from File Sharing and once shared, place a check mark in the box for Enable Automount.  From here, click on…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: Pushing Out Policies Using Open Directory

    Now if you’re looking to push policies out from a centralized directory service that is not Active Directory then you will have slightly more work to do.  You will be using the poledit.exe utility rather than gpedit.msc.  The poledit.exe tool is stored on a Windows 2000 Server CD.  If you install the Admin Tools using the driveletteri386adminpak.msi installer then you will be able to build a policy file in adm format that can then be distributed.  When you open the Poledit.exe application you will click on File-> New New Policy.  From here you will see Default User and Default computer (much as with it’s successor gpedit.msc).  Options in poledit.exe for…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: Setting up Admin Users of Windows XP through Open Directory PDC

    If you want the “admin” group to map to the NT “Directory Admins” group, the best way is to use dscl(1) to set the SMBSID or SMBRID attributes on the “admin” group record to 500.  If there is no SMBRID attribute then open the appropriate group, enable inspector and create an attribute called SMBRID.  You can give it a value that corresponds to the table below: http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=200608252114039&query=PDC%2Bgroups PS – Thanks Joel!

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X: Bluetooth

    Ever wonder what the process is that manages Bluetooth on your machine? Well, it’s blued.  Now, I’ve had the occasion where I wanted to outright disable blued, so I’ve actually renamed it or removed it from my system image. But what if you want to set any preferences for Bluetooth? Well, those are stored in the com.apple.Bluetooth.*.plist file. The * here is due to the fact that it’s based on your machine, thus a ByHost Preference. The location is /var/root/Library/Preferences/ByHost. So if you take that preference file and copy it to another machine it won’t actually work. The other machine will create another as it has a different machine address.…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: Reset Last URL with Open Directory

    So I recently pushed out an image after trying to connect to an AFP server that couldn’t be accessed.  The account that was used was being used by an entire lab of 100 machines so I really needed to get that URL out of there.  What to do?  Well, first open Workgroup Manager and click on the group in question.  Then click on Preferences and then the Details tab.  Next, click on the + sign and browse to /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app.  Next click on com.apple.finder and click on the pencil.  Here drop down the Often disclosure triangle and click on the FXConnectToLastURL button.  From here, change the value of the key to the server you…