As I mentioned a while back, I recently switched to a new web hosting provider, Media Temple. I wanted to provide a bit more detail as to why. About a month-and-a-half ago I was uploading some new content to my personal site, which hosts a fair amount of video and audio for download, on my [...]
Just this past week, Google made their CalDAV support — and, specifically, their support for iCal and other desktop calendar clients — official. A while back I reported on the beta version of this feature, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the beta had actually ended. Along with offical support, Google is now [...]
I’ve long extolled the virtues of network-based home accounts, at least in some situations. And, of course, I’ve written copiously on how to implement such a thing in a lab setting. What I’ve never really done in any meaningful way, or for any length of time, is to use network home accounts myself. Until now. [...]
Because of the recent departure of Apple’s Senior VP of Enterprise Sales, John C. Welch claims that “the Mac IT crowd” is wondering if Apple is abandoning the Enterprise. He then goes on to say that this depends on whether or not you thought “Apple was, or wanted to be, an ‘enterprise’ company.” Um… No [...]
I covered secondary DNS configuration in Tiger (10.4) Server a while back. And while the buttons have moved around a bit, most of those instructions apply to Leopard as well. Leopard does have one fairly cool new addition worth mentioning, though: forwarders. Generally I’m setting up secondary DNS for internal networks, and generally those internal [...]
There are a bunch of legacy issues at my new job. Many of them, I believe (I’m not completely sure, I’m still pretty new after all), stem from the once heavy use of IRIX and its peculiarities. We are only just reaching a point at which we can do away, once and for all, with [...]
There’s a common occurrence in the world of systems administration. Once I describe it you’ll probably all nod you’re heads knowingly and go, “Yeah, that happens to me all the time.” It happened to me recently, in fact. I was attempting to set a Linux system to authenticate via a freshly-built LDAP server — something [...]
So far this NetBoot/NetInstall thing is working out a thousand times better than I ever thought it would. I wish I’d done this years ago. Not only does it save time, it also reduces errors. This is often one of the most overlooked features of automating a process: the less human interaction in the process, [...]
So this is going great. I have a really solid Base OS Install, and a whole buttload of packages now. Packages that set everything from network settings to custom and specialized users. I can build a typical system in about 45 minutes, and I can do most of the building from my office (or any [...]
I’ve become quite the package whiz, if I do say so myself. Actually, I’m probably doing something ass-backwards, but still, I wanted to share some of my working methods as they seem to be, well… Um… Working… One of the things I’m doing is using packages to run shell scripts that make computer settings (like [...]