Latest Articles

mail-server

OSX Server Mailman Tricks

We have been using XServes as our primary mail servers at my organization for about two years now, we upgraded from an older Linux system and we could not be happier, since moving over to the 10.6 platform, we have enjoyed almost no email downtime, very easy to manage mail system and of course all the goodies that you would expect to run, some of which I have already mentioned (Squirrelmail) and also Mailman. Through my time configuring the server, migrating data and through other requests I have compiled a...

wiki-server

10.6.4 Group Calendars in iCal officially supported

Group calendars in Apples Wiki Server has been an uncomfortable conversation piece among 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 Apple Systems Administrators. Ever since Apple has given us the ability to use web based group calendars its been a cat and mouse game to get some level of support in iCal. In 10.4 when these calendars first came out it was a very cool idea give users their own calendars and give them a web interface to use it. Allow them to subscribe to their calendars in iCal which allowed the user...

osx-system-administration

Understanding Mobile Access Server

Well if you were like me you were thrilled about the idea of Apples new Snow Leopard Server feature Mobile Access server. So great what is it, what does it do? Well it keeps your private web, ical and mail data secure without the use of a VPN and its really easy to setup. Great I was sold, and I started down the path of figuring out the Mobile Access Server. The more I got down into the nitty gritty of the setup the more I realized just what a...

osx-system-administration

III Syncing a failover website : Scheduling the sync

So now we have our backup script, we have our secure SSH tunnel between the two servers and we have successfully synced our two databases and our files. Now we just have to schedule this task so that we do not have to manually run this each time we need to synchronize our systems. On Mac OSX Servers you have two options you can use Crontab and run a Cronjob, or you can use Launchd. If your running a Linux server then your pretty limited to just a Cronjob. We...

osx-system-administration

II Syncing a failover website : The Sync script

In this article we are picking up where we left off, we now have the ability to connect from our primary server to our secondary server without the need to enter a password with the help of a secret key. If you are lost at this point please refer to the last article Syncing a failover website : Creating an SSH key. At this point all we need to do is setup the bash script. We will create the script to log all of its activity so that we know...

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...

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