• Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: AquaConnect

    June 28, 2008

    I was talking to this client one day and without thinking much of it, we got into the topic of a Mac OS X-based version of Citrix/Terminal Services.  I lamented how I wish that there was a thin client for the Mac that worked like Citrix or Terminal Server but that there wasn’t and that it was the kind of thing that the server admin community for Mac products had been hoping for.  Well, little did I know that the guy was really, really smart and would basically write one within two weeks.  As with many things, the devil is in the details and over the past year or two…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: Spotlight

    April 28, 2008

    When client systems need to search the server quickly you can enable Spotlight on the Share Points.  To enable this, open Server Admin -> File Sharing -> Share Points -> Click the Share Point in question -> Click Share Point -> Check the box for Enable Spotlight -> Click Save. Then have a nice long steak dinner.

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  • Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: Minimum Requirements

    April 25, 2008

    Banging your head against the keyboard trying to figure out why you can’t get this install to complete…  It’s a headless server, but that shouldn’t matter…  Hmmmm…  Well, before trying to install a system remotely, be sure the server includes 1 GB or more of memory, a G5 processor or 867 MHz or faster G4 processor (or an Intel of course).  But what was killing me on this server upgrade?  The 20GB hard drive requirement.  OMG – is it really possible that the server had previously blown out the drive that came with it and gotten one of those old Quantum Fireballs from back in the day?  Really?  Who’d a thunk…

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  • Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: Software Update Server Setup

    April 15, 2008

    The settings are to automatically mirror all Apple updates.  These updates are then provided over port 8088.  Settings can be seen as follows: In order to disable an update that may be problematic for your environment, you can click on the Updates tab and uncheck the Enable dialog for the specified update. Setting up a Software Update Server if you are using Open Directory is a fairly simple task.  Just open Workgroup Manager, connect to an OD server or the appropriate Directory Service and then click on the computer or computer group you would like to edit the software update information for and then click on Preferences.  Then click on…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Apple Remote Desktop: Setting up a Task Server

    April 14, 2008

    Step 1 In order to enable a system to be used as a Task Server, open Remote Desktop, click on the Remote Desktop menu item and click on Preferences.  Then click on the Task Server tab and click on Use Task Server on this Computer.  Then check the box for Allow Remote Connections to this Server.     Step 2 To utilize the task server that you have just setup, go to one of the computers that will use Remote Desktop for management and open Remote Desktop, click on the Remote Desktop menu item and click on Preferences.  Then click on the Task Server tab and click on Use Remote…

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  • Mac OS X Server,  Unix

    Mac OS X Server: php.ini

    April 10, 2008

      A customer recently called asking us to expand the timeout variable for downloading files via PHP from their server. By default the php.ini file does not exist in Mac OS X Server. If you need to use php.ini to granularly configure the parameters for PHP then you should download it from php.net by downloading the source code for PHP for the version that comes up when you run php -v from your server. In the tarball there will be a file called php.ini-recommended. Then copy this file to /etc/php.ini and modify the appropriate settings: upload_max_filesize = whatever you want the new maximum to be  posters.max_execution_time = 30 max_input_time = 60 post_max_size…

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