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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Apple Certified Associate For OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
Apple has posted the first of the Mountain Lion certifications. Information about the Apple Certified Associate – Mac Integration 10.8 is available at http://training.apple.com/certification/macosx. This certification requires only one exam, 9L0-408, which can be taken online. There’s no word yet on the ACSP or ACTC for 10.8, although I am certain work on them is in progress. The current table of certifications is as follows: The test is relatively simple. I took it this morning and it focused completely on the client in a heterogenous environment. There were questions about AD binding, sharing files between Windows and OS X Mountain Lion clients, securing the OS (Gatekeeper, FileVault 2), Time Machine, Messages…
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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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Cascading Software Updates in Mountain Lion Server
A number of files got shuffled around in Mountain Lion Server. One is the swupd.plist file used to daisy chain multiple servers so they act as a cascade of software update servers. The new path for the property list is /Library/Server/Software Update/Config/swupd.plist. Here, the metaIndexURL key is sill the location that points to an internal Software Update Server that the server you are editing should look to for updates. To set a server to look at another internal server for software updates, edit the metaIndexURL key in the /Library/Server/Software Update/Config/swupd.plist file to include the path to the new server. The path should always have /content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist after the FQDN of the host…
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What Changed On My Mac?
According to Wikipedia, fsevents is an API from Apple that allows applications to register for notifications of changes to a given directory tree. This means that when something changes, an application (or daemon/agent) can see the change and take action or track what happened. For Linux, there’s a similar tool in iNotify. This time of the year, a lot of imaging and packaging is going on at schools and companies around the world. A lot of people are also moving various settings out of images and into either post-flight packages, automations or managed preferences of some sort. In OS X, it’s easy to make a change on a computer and…