Yesterday we looked at setting up an Open Directory Master in OS X Mountain Lion Server. An Open Directory Replica keeps a copy of the Open Directory database available for users even when the Master goes offline. But it can also take a part of the load from the Open Directory Master and when using the new Locales feature, balance network traffic. To get started with an Open Directory Replica, first enable SSH, now disabled by default. Next, use the changeip to check the host name. While the Server app is cool, it caches stuff and I’ve seen it let things go threat shouldn’t be let go. Therefore, in order…
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Setting Up an Open Directory Master in OS X Mountain Lion Server
Open Directory has never been so easy to setup for a basic environment as it is in OS X Mountain Lion Server. It’s also never been so annoyingly simple to use that to do anything cool requires a bunch of command line foo. No offense to the developers, but this whole idea that the screens that were being continually refined for a decade just need to be thrown out and started fresh seems to have led to a few babies thrown out along with them. Not often as I’m kinda’ digging most of the new config screens in OS X Mountain Lion Server, but with Open Directory, it’s just too…
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Managing DNS Using Mac OS X Mountain Lion Server
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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Configuring Mountain Lion Server's Contacts Server
Mountain Lion has an application called Contacts. Mountain Lion Server has a service called Contacts. While the names might imply differently, surprisingly the two are designed to work with one another. The Contacts service was called Address Book in Lion and below and is based on CardDAV, a protocol for storing contact information on the web, retrievable and digestible by client computers. The Contacts service is also a conduit with which to read information from LDAP and display that information in the Contacts client, which is in a way similar to how the Global Address List (GAL) works in Microsoft Exchange. I know I’ve said this about other services in…
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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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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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Setting Up The Mail Service in Mountain Lion Server
Mail is one of the hardest services to manage. Actually, mail is pretty simple in and of itself: there’s protocols people use to access their mail (such as IMAP and POP), protocols used to communicate between mail servers and send mail (SMTP, SMTPS) and then there’s a database of mail and user information. In Mount Lion Server, all of these are represented by a single ON button, so it really couldn’t be easier. But then there’s the ecoysystem and the evil spammers. As a systems administrator of a large number of mail servers, I firmly believe that there is a special kind of hell where only spam is served at…
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Manage Gatekeeper from the Command Line in Mountain Lion
Gatekeeper is the new feature of OS X that controls what types of apps can be opened. To configure Gatekeeper, open the Security & Privacy System Preference pane. Click on the General tab and unlock to make changes. Here, you’ll see “Allow applications downloaded from:” along with the following 3 options: Mac App Store: Only apps downloaded from the App Store can be opened. “Mac App Store and identified developers”: Only apps downloaded from the App Store and those signed can be opened. Anywhere: Any app can be opened. Configuring Gatekeeper is as easy as selecting one of these options. Now, under the hood, the state of Gatekeeper is kept…
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Add Services to Server Admin From the Command Line
In the Server Admin application, you need to enable any services before you can actually start them. In order to do so to a lot of servers at once, you want to automate that. Such automation can be done using the serveradmin command line options. The settings would be sent to info. To see all of the settings available there: serveradmin settings info Note that there’s a whole section for info:serviceConfig: info:serviceConfig:roles:com.apple.SimpleServerSetup.ODPlugin:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.DirectoryServices:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.NetBoot:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.AddressBook:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.SWUpdate:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.NAT:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Mail:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Notification:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.VPN:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.DHCP:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Calendar:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.AppleFile:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Jabber:configured = yes…
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Missing Server.app Settings for AFP
Earlier, I wrote an article on enabling some of the settings in SMB that are now unavailable in the GUI, but were still available from the command line. I have now decided to go ahead an document some of the ones for AFP that have been removed during the transition to the Server app. The first to mention is maximum connections. There are a number of reasons that throttling maximum afp connections can be handy. The serveradmin afp setting for it is maxConnections, which by default is set to -1, indicating unlimited. To set this to 500, one would run: serveradmin settings afp:maxConnections = 500 The second setting to mention…