• Mac OS X Server

    “Address already in use” When Trying To Bind Open Directory Master

    From time to time you’ll see an error that “daemon: bind(8) failed errno=48 (Address already in use)” when trying to promote a Mac OS X Server to be an Open Directory Master. The address in question is usually fine and the DNS usually checks clean with changeip: changeip -checkhostname However the error recurs no matter what you do, even if you try and change the name of the Open Directory Master or the address you still usually end up seeing the same error. If it isn’t the address or the name then could it be the port? If you run lsof to see about that whole ldap port: lsof -i…

  • Mac OS X

    Disable Outgoing Mail Sound In Apple Mail

    There are so many reasons that disabling the outgoing mail sound in OS X might be a good idea for some. To disable the sound, write a key called MailSentSoundPath with the contents of a path to the new sound into the com.apple.mail defaults domain (in this case we’re just not gonna’ send it any real data so it doesn’t play a sound): defaults write com.apple.mail MailSentSoundPath /devnull The close Mail and open it again. Try sending yourself an email and the sound should be gone. To enable the sound again, just delete the MailSentSoundPath key: defaults delete com.apple.mail MailSentSoundPath

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Xsan

    MDSChannelPeerCreate and Shared Volumes

    These two errors: com.apple.AppleFileServer[8123] MDSChannelPeerCreate: (os/kern) invalid argument MDSChannelPeerRef MDSChannelPeerCreate(CFAllocatorRef, CFDictionaryRef): (os/kern) invalid argument I see them frequently when we’re using dynamic or shared storage (e.g. Xsan or removable media) to share volumes between multiple computers and then share those shared volumes to clients through a network sharing protocol (e.g. afp or smb). They usually mean that the system doesn’t have enough permissions to do those MDSChannelPeerCreate processes. Therefore, we need to open those permissions up a little and then let the file sharing services restart. I usually do it this way: serveradmin stop afp serveradmin stop smb chown -R root:staff /Volumes/VOLUMENAME/.fseventsd chmod -R 770 /Volumes/VOLUMENAME/.fseventsd chown -R root:staff /Volumes/VOLUMENAME/.Spotlight-V100…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment

    Is My Apple Computer Under Warranty?

    Apple has a site used to check the warranty agreement of Apple hardware. You will need your serial number. To obtain that, click on the Apple menu and then click on About this Mac. From there, click on the greyed Version line until you see the Serial Number. You could also click on the More Info… button to see the Serial Number. Once you have the serial number, navigate to: https://selfsolve.apple.com/agreementWarrantyDynamic.do?newid=y. From there, enter the serial number to see the warranty status as can be seen here. You can also build this type of functionality into scripts or other systems. To do so, just inject the serial number as a sn= in…

  • Kerio,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Network Infrastructure

    A Little More About afctl in OS X Server

    Awhile back I wrote an article on managing the Adaptive Firewall built into Mountain Lion Server at https://krypted.com//mac-os-x-server/managing-lion-servers-adaptive-firewall-from-the-command-line. It’s worth mentioning that when you use this command you’re basically editing some text files. These include the blacklist, blockedHosts and whitelist folders at possibly the shortest folder at this depth in the file system that I’ve ever had the good luck to need to use /var/db/af (okay, okay, I’m sure we’ve all made /a/b/c and that’s shorter, but this is pretty close). You should use afctl to add and remove machines from these lists. The -w option in afctl used to add a host to a whitelist will cause the host…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  personal

    Half Off My Book (and other O'Reilly Titles)!

    In Celebration of *Day Against DRM* Save 50% on 5000+ Ebooks & Videos at O’Reilly (including mine). And save 60% on orders over $100, so feel free to order multiple copies of my book! Having the ability to download files at your convenience, store them on all your devices, or share them with a friend or colleague as you would a print book is liberating, and is how it should be. This is a critical moment in the fight against DRM. A proposal currently being considered by the W3C would weave DRM into HTML5 — in other words, into the very fabric of the Web. Ebooks from oreilly.com are DRM-free.…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Configure OS X To Restart Automatically

    Servers should always restart automatically in the event that they loose power or freeze up. When you’re setting up a lot of servers, it’s helpful to be able to tell the system to restart automatically if a server freezes from the command line. The command to have a system restart automatically in such a way is systemsetup. The systemsetup command has a -setrestartfreeze option. To enable the feature: systemsetup -setrestartfreeze on To disable: systemsetup -setrestartfreeze off

  • public speaking

    My MacSysAdmin Presentations For Today

    The first presentation I’ll be doing at MacSysAdmin today is on Windows Server in Mac OS X and iOS environments, which can be found here: MacSysAdmin_Windows The second presentation I’ll be doing today at MacSysAdmin is on iOS deployment, which can be found here: MacSysAdmin_iOS If you’re not able to attend then I hope you will enjoy. I’ll try and get them to Tycho for uploading to the official site asap.

  • Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    A Guide To Using Mountain Lion Server (OS X 10.8)

    I’ve been doing a number of postings on how to use various features of the latest version of OS X Server. Given that WordPress is pretty much a reverse chronological listing of articles I’ve written, I thought I’d put together a listing of the pages that I’ve done for OS X Server 10.8 (Mountain Lion Server) in order to offer a more pedagogically aligned way of reading these posts. As such, here is the Table of Contents for these posts: Introduction What Changed 10 Impactful Changes Upgrading from Lion Upgrading from Snow Leopard Managing the Server Configuring Alerts Using Web Modules Enable Push Notifications Configuring Time and Time Services Setting Up…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Server Admin Web Modules, curl & You

    Since the early days, OS X Server has supported performing the serveradmin commands through a web interface. This interface was accessible at the address of the server followed by a colon and then 311 in a web browser. This feature was disabled by default in Mountain Lion. But fear causes hesitation, and hesitation will cause your worst fears to come true, so we’re going to turn it back on. To enable, use the following command: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.servermgrd requireUserAgent -bool false Once done, open https://127.0.0.1:311 in a web browser, or replace 127.0.0.1 with the address of the server if accessing from another location. This is stimulating, but we’re out of…