The Caching Server in OS X Server 5.2 (for Sierra) does content, apps, and software updates. The Software Update service is hidden by default indicating it will likely be removed from the Server app in a future update, although when is kinda’ up in the air. The Software Update service can still be enabled for now, which we’ll look at later. The Caching service on the Server app works like a proxy. When 10 of your users download that latest Nicholas Sparks book and movie, you only sacrifice your WAN pipe to download it once, and the other 9 people piggy-back off that. And when 10.12.1 ships, you only need to download it over…
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Troubleshooting Apache, Proxies, and Tomcat in OS X Server 5
OS X Server 5 dropped last week. It’s the first time I’ve seen an OS X Server version drop before an OS release. I’m guessing there was an impetus to get it out the door before OS X 10.11 ships, so that caching and software update servers can facilitate quicker adoption and tools like Profile Manager will work on 0-day. But, there are some funny issues that are popping up. One of these is OS X Server usurping some ports that would otherwise potentially be used by other tools. Notably for Casper administrators, this includes port 8443. So here are some issues I’ve seen with Apache in the latest OS…
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Use The Caching Server In OS X Server 5
The Caching Server in OS X Server 5 (for El Capitan and Yosemite) now does content and Software Updates. Woohoo, the promised land. Now, when 10 of your users download that latest Nicholas Sparks book and movie, you only sacrifice your WAN pipe to download it once, and the other 9 people piggy-back off that. And when OS X El Capitan ships, you only need to download it over the WAN once, and the other local users will pull off that spiffy Caching Server sitting in your office. Pretty sweet, right? So, how do you use this ultra-complicated service. Well, it looks and feels kinda’ like an iPad app. Which is…
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Clear Squid Proxy Caches
Every now and then you run into a problem with a caching server that causes you to need to clear out the cache. If running Squid, you can look in the /etc/squid/squid.conf configuration file and find a setting in that file called the cache_dir, which is a path. For example, we’ll use /var/squid/cache in this article. You can clear the cache of a Squid proxy then, by deleting that directory: rm -Rf /var/squid/cache Then recreate the cache directory: mkdir /var/squid/cache Then run squid with a -z option: squid -z Then fire up squid again: squid
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Restricting Access To Sites On iOS Devices
One of the more common requests we get for iOS devices is to restrict what sites on the web that a device can access. This can be done in a number of ways. The best, in my experience, has been using a proxy. In Apple Configurator 1.2 there’s an option for a Global HTTP Proxy for Supervised devices. This allows you to have a proxy for HTTP traffic that is persistent across apps. Each Wi-Fi network that you push to devices also has the ability to have a proxy associated as well. This is supported by pretty much every MDM solution, with screens similar to the following, which is how…
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Final Cut Server: Using Amazon S3 for Archival
Final Cut Server allows you to archive the primary representation (or the original file) for assets that are cataloged. When you do so, the proxy clips (low resolution versions) of your assets still live on the Final Cut Server. However, the primary representation, once moved to your archive device can then be archived off to another form of media. There are a variety of strategies to manage archived media. The one I will describe here is using the Amazon S3 storage service at a cost of approximately $.12 to $.15 per gigabyte. As a conduit to and from Amazon S3 we will use the Jungle Disk application, which uses the…
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ProCon Firefox Plug-in Filter
Firefox users who wish to filter browsing (eliminate filtered words, etc) can use ProCon Latte, a Plug-in for Firefox. ProCon is available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1803 and can easily be deployed alongside Firefox.