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Samba is the result of some clever reverse-engineering to create reliable Windows file sharing without the headaches of a Windows server. Mac OS X clients can also use these shares, making Samba a great option for cross-platform environments. It’s not a common scenario to use an Open Directory server to control Linux systems, but here’s how to do it if you have one already, and want to use Samba on Linux with your OD users.  If you are finding the Xserve platform to be a little out of your budget for the amount of performance you get, or you don’t want to administrate yet another Mac OS X Server system, this could be a great alternative to an AFP solution for your Macs.

We could host SMB shares directly on our OD server, but ideally we keep our OD server just as a directory and authentication server, and let other servers do the file sharing heavy lifting. More »

The iChat Server module in Mac OS X Server provides a great interface to the jabberd daemon, getting you up and running quickly with standard and Kerberos authentication using your Open Directory users. Unfortunately, there are a few useful features that are not yet accessible in Server Admin. One of these is a simple tool for automatically setting everyone to be a buddy with each other. In smaller organizations, it’s a great way to get in touch with everyone without having to ask everyone to become a buddy individually. More »

Mac OS X Server builds on well-known and powerful unix tools, tools which are at your full disposal if you understand how they work.  One of these is the FreeRADIUS server included with 10.5 and 10.6 Server.

As is typical of Mac OS X Server, Server Admin makes it easy to add Apple base stations to authenticate against Open Directory using RADIUS.  But what if you want to use the RADIUS server for other devices?  Most decent managed switches and routers can authenticate to RADIUS.  Wouldn’t it be great to have them authenticate against Open Directory?  Read on. More »

The 8-core Xserve platform has often seemed overpriced and overkill for many IT server applications that require less performance, but must have server isolation for industry compliance, security, and high availability.  Parallels has made a welcome step forward in virtualization on the Xserve platform, with Parallels Server for Mac.  For an initial release, it has proven quite dependable despite a few issues with recent X Server updates.  No doubt this product will continue to improve in the near future, and it’s exciting to see the Xserve hardware used more efficiently.

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If after an update is applied to Mac OS X 10.5.x Server you find yourself unexpectedly looking at Server Assistant upon restart you might try this to get your server backup to normal. At least in my case this problem was solved by doing the following:

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Updated: 6/6/2007 I added some Apple script for all you Googlers.

First a little background: for a while now I have been teaching about “URL Fun” in my server classes. Its a pretty universal concept that you find server admins implementing on Mac OS X clients: the idea of an alias, link, script or application that connects to a server on login. The windows folks normally refer to this conceptually as a “Mapped Network Drive” which is why I choose it for the name of this article. I actually find it humorous how often I get asked to make a link to the “x” or “q” drive when doing consulting, its actually a testment to how simple this works on windows, people have no idea of the shares name, just the drive letter ( for better or worse sometimes ). Now there are multiple ways of accomplishing this on OS X ,some are better or fancier then others. All of them try at best to get around requiring users to use “Go” > “Connect To Server”

Part 1: “Aliases” and “Location” Files

Part 2: AppleScript and Login items

Part 3: Shell Scripts and Login Hooks

Part 4: Automounts with Directory Services More »

If you are using Mac OS X Server to host websites, you might want to be able to track how many folks are hitting your websites. One popular and free web statistics package is awstats.

Read on to find out how to setup awstats on Mac OS X Server.

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