Latest Articles

osx-system-administration

I Syncing a failover website : Creating an SSH key

Recently at our organization we were charged with the task of creating an auto failover solution for our websites. Basically the idea here is that we have our web server sitting in a data center but if for some reason the server were to ever go down then the website would fail over to a second server where a duplicate of the website is waiting to be accessed in the event that the primary ever had an issue. This is doable but it requires that you have all your ducks...

data-recovery

Missing a file? Scrub that hard drive

Today one of the most dreaded things happened to me, the phrase that makes every IT professional shudder. I can not find my file. Ok, after running through all of the basic questions and making sure that they saved it and that it was not accidentally deleted I decided to search their hard drive. After many un-sucessfull attempts at using the search functionality (Spotlight), I decided to do some research on other methods for searching for files on the OSX platform. I came across the “locate” command for the Terminal....

mail-server

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...

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...

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...

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...