Jon Brown - Developer, entrepreneur, and Apple technologist

10.6.2 Mail Server draws a blank, subject?

So we upgraded from 10.5.8 Mail server to 10.6.2 and everything went very smoothly. Mailstores were migrated and the transition from Cyrus to Dovecot was great. However once all the email was moved over and all the settings were double, and triple checked. People started complaining that every once in a while their email was not getting through the server, it was getting bounced back to the sender. At first I thought that it was an internal issue with the users on our network, then I got a complaint from...

Jan 26, 2010

dns-settings wiki-server

10.6.2 Migrate Wiki Server & DNS

While migrating our servers services from 10.5 to our 10.6.2 production server one of the easiest migrations that I had found was to migrate the 10.5 Wiki. Simply copying files and making sure that the permissions remain in tact are really all you need. However in 10.6.2 there is a detachment from the way you authenticate. You create access for each blog based on the settings in the web interface rather than in Workgroup Manager. This threw me off a bit the first time due to the fact that I...

Jan 25, 2010

mail-server

10.6.2 Dovecot Mail Backups

Before migrating to 10.6 Server we were running our entire mailstore on the 10.5.8 platform. Say what you will about Leopard, once we had it set up correctly it ran fine. We migrated because of the greater benefits of Dovecot over Cyrus. Many of the other features intriqued us as well such as the improved Wiki server and iCal server. However we were really excited about Dovecots ability to repair itself basically doing away with the need to ever have to rebuild a users mailbox. The one great thing about...

Jan 24, 2010

mail-server osx-system-administration

10.6.2 Squirrelmail, LDAP & Sieve

Snow Leopard 10.6 comes with built in Server Side rules (Sieve) that helps you to organize mail, if your like me and am supremely disappointed at the lack of functionality then you will be happy to know that there are alternatives out there. Snow Leopard still ships with a copy of Squirrel mail for OSX it also ships with many cool plugins for squirrel mail already installed. Lets look at the alternative to the built in Sieve scripts that ship with 10.6 Snow Leopard server. To start with you must...

Jan 23, 2010

dns-settings

10.6.2 Split Horizon DNS

The DNS interface in Server Admin.app is not suitable for doing a split-horizon DNS configuration. It simply doesn’t expose all of the flexibility of bind that you need to pull off such a configuration. If you poke around the bind config files on your OS X Server, you’ll be able to see how apple has set them up so that you can edit them directly without confusing the GUI. /var/named contains zone files that you may edit, and they include corresponding files in /var/named/zones which you should not edit. They’ve...

Jan 23, 2010

mail-server

10.6.2 Roundcube & LDAP

So like many other organizations mine was finally fed up with Horde as a webmail system. They had used squirrel mail in the past and was unimpressed by the graphical interface but admitted that it while it lacked glamour it always did perform as they would have expected. Before I had started there their mail system was running on a Linux box using Plesk and running Horde as their primary webmail interface. Immediately I got them into an XServe running OSX mail since their entire organization consisted of Apple iMacs...

Jan 18, 2010

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