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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Using Time Machine Server in Mountain Lion Server
The Time Machine service in Mountain Lion Server hasn’t changed much from the service in Lion Server. To enable the Time Machine service, open the Server app, click on Time Machine in the SERVICES sidebar. If the service hasn’t been enabled to date, the ON/OFF switch will be in the OFF position and no “Backup destination” will be shown in the Settings pane. Click on the ON button to see a list of volumes to use as a destination for Time Machine backups. This should be large enough to have space for all of the users that can potentially use the Time Machine service hosted on the server. When you…
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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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Where Did All My Server Commands Go In Mountain Lion Server?!?!
Mountain Lion Server is a lot more self-sufficient as an app than it used to be. Not only do you no longer need the Server Admin and Workgroup Manager applications to manage the server, but the Server app actually has a faux root for the tools that were once distributed almost haphazardly across the rest of the file system. These objects are now stored in a faux root, where /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot is the path to the faux root itself. If you need to access any command line tools, they are relatively placed to that path. For example, if you’re experimenting around with Profile Manager and need to wipe the database with…
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Migrating the Wiki Service in Mac OS X Server
Lion brings with it a few challenges for administrators. One such is migrating the wiki service into the new format. When doing an upgrade in place, the Wiki service is pretty straight forward to upgrade, but in many cases, due to aging hardware, wiki services are moving from an older computer to a newer computer. This can be done in one of two ways. The first is to “migrate” the data by copying the Collaboration folder onto the new system. The second is to “export” and “import” the data. I usually recommend doing a migrate where possible, so we’ll start with that method. Note: Before getting started, make sure that…
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Forcing NFS to Use TCP
NFS has 3 settings in Lion Server: nbDaemons, the number of NFS daemons, useTCP, whether or not TCP is used and useUDP, whether or not udp is used. To disable UDP forces TCP: serveradmin settings nfs:useUDP = 0 Or to turn UDP back on: serveradmin settings nfs:useUDP = 1 To disable TCP if you’d rather just use UDP: serveradmin settings nfs:useTCP = 0 Or to turn TCP back on: serveradmin settings nfs:useTCP = 1
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Using ServerBackup to Backup Lion Servers
ServerBackup is a new command included in Lion Server, located in the /usr/sbin/ServerBackup directory. The ServerBackup command is used to backup the server settings for services running on a Lion Server. The command is pretty easy and straight forward to use, but does require you to be using Time Machine in order to actually run. In the most basic form, ServerBackup is invoked to run a backup using the backup command. Commands are prefixed with a -cmd followed by the actual command. As you might be able to guess, the commandlet to fire off a backup is backup. The backup command requires a -source option which will almost always be…
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Working with Postgres from the Command Line in Lion Server
Mac OS X Server 10.7, Lion Server, comes with a few substantial back-end changes. One of these is the move from SQLite3 to PostgreSQL for many of the back-end databases, including Wiki and Podcast Producer (collab), Webmail (roundcubemail), iCal Server and Address Book Server (caldav) and as the back-end to the newest service in Lion Server, Profile Manager (device_management). As such, it’s now important to be able to use PostgreSQL the way we once used SQLite3, when trying to augment the data that these databases contains, as there currently aren’t a lot of options for editing this data (aside from manually of course). Postgres has a number of commands that…
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When Zones Just Won't Die
At times, you may find that information gets stuck in Server Admin and can’t be removed. For example, you see a Zone in Server Admin, and it doesn’t have a Name Server record attached to it. You can’t delete it but every time you add a Name Server it just disappears. This is often caused when you remove or change something and it gets dumped from the zone files in /var/named but not from the BIND view. Running serveradmin will show the data but as it’s serialized it can’t be removed: serveradmin settings dns Without a Name Server record, the zone is unresponsive to queries. Removing the zone can delete the…
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iPhone Apps for OS X Server Admins
There is a really nice app for Mac OS X Server admins from Harlekins called Server Admin Remote. You can see more information about it at the Server Admin Remote website, here. Basically, Server Admin Remote is a nice front end for a few serveradmin commands, showing which services are installed and the status of services. It also looks at server host names, CPU, network loads, service logs and some of the more important stats per service (ie – concurrent connections for AFP. Overall it’s a great little app for the Server Admin to quickly be able to restart a service or just look at statuses of services. It runs over…