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Come visit our booth at Macworld 2010 on the expo floor. We are located in Booth 566C and have a bunch of free schwag to give out.

We also have a number of sessions this year:

Hands-on Snow Leopard Server: Collaboration Services with Charles Edge
2/10 – 1:00PM to 3:00PM

Push: The Next Generation of Collaboration is Snow Leopard Server with Charles Edge
2/11 – 4:30PM to 6:00PM

Advanced Integration with Final Cut Server with Beau Hunter
2/12 – 3:30PM to 5:00PM

iPhone Mass Deployment with Zack Smith
2/13 – 2:30PM to 4:00PM

We hope to see you there!

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McAfee has announced that they will be acquiring MXLogic, outsourcer of message hygiene solutions. This strengthens the cloud offerings from McAfee and also brings one of the better known spam names into the umbrella of a larger entity. This move should allow MXLogic to strengthen offerings while allowing McAfee to bundle further services into existing MXLogic environments.

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If you’re wondering what was included in the 10.5.7 update, the itemized list has been compiled here.

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We have posted another article to Xsanity on “Setting up the Network Stack from the Command Line”. An excerpt from the article is as follows:

Interconnectivity with Xsan is usually a pretty straight forward beast. Make sure you can communicate in an unfettered manner on a house network, on a metadata network and on a fibre channel network and you’re pretty much good to go. One thing that seems to confuse a lot of people when they’re first starting out is how to configure the two ethernets. We’re going to go ahead and do two things at once, explain how to configure the interface and show how to automate said configuration from the command line so you can quickly deploy and then subsequently troubleshoot issues that you encounter from the perspective of the Ethernet networks.

View the full article here.

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We have posted another article on Xsanity. This one is on managing Fibre Channel settings from the command line. The following is an excerpt from the article:

Once upon a time there was Fibre Channel Utility. Then there was a System Preference pane. But the command line utility, fibreconfig, is the quickest, most verbose way of obtaining information and setting various parameters for your Apple branded cards.

To get started with fibreconfig, it’s easiest to start with just asking the fibreconfig binary to simply display all the information available on the fibre channel environment. This can be done by using the –l option as follows:

View the full article here.

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We have published another article on Xsanity. This one on using removable media with Xsan. More importantly this article shows how to label a LUN using the command line tool cvlabel. An excerpt is as follows:

Sometimes you just need a small SAN for testing… Times when you don’t have fiber channel and you don’t need to provide access to multiple clients, like maybe if you’re writing an article for Xsanity on an airplane. Now this volume is not going to be supported (or supportable) by anyone and nor should it be (so don’t use it for real data), but you can use USB and FireWire drives for a small test Xsan…

View the full article here.

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Rumpus 6.0

Maxum has come up with a new Release of their famous FTP server software. Rumpus is an internet file transfer server for OS X that allows for quick easy, secure file transfers. If you were luck to purchase Rumpus 5.x after January 1, 2007 a free upgrade is ready for download.  A $99 upgrade is for older upgrades.

The latest version of Rumpus has many new features that might entice users to upgrade listed below.

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We wrote an article on using cvadmin to manage Xsan from the command line. It’s available on Xsanity here.

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UDDI is an acronymn for Universal Description, Discovery and Integration. It is a specification used for publishing and locating information about services.

In Windows Server 2008 it can be used within a domain (intranet), or between companies sharing data (extranet or Internet).

From the Microsoft Website:

“Microsoft UDDI Services provides developers and IT administrators with the following benefits:
• A scalable solution for organizing, discovering, reusing, and managing Web services and other programmable resources
• A standards-based infrastructure that is compliant with Version 2 of the UDDI application programming interface (API) specifications
• Categorization schemes for describing providers and their Web services that you can customize to meet the needs of your organization
• Integration with various development tools
• User-friendly administration with the UDDI Services snap-in”

What this means is if you wanted to build a client application, and then want other applications to use information from that application (without having to re-invent the wheel so to say), it would be possible with UDDI. It opens up a whole new opportunity for sharing and utilizing ideas, projects, or resources that have already been developed. These deliverable resources can be used for furthering other developments that may need to use only pieces of the original project (or resource) to further itself.

It would seem that after the public UDDI nodes were closed in January 2006, UDDI seemed to find a home in private corporate implementation. This is especially so when implemented in projects where multiple heterogeneous applications request resources that only the UDDI can provide. UDDI client applications can request certain data that the UDDI can provide regardless of the Operating System that the client application resides on.

The following is a brief summary of the offerings of UDDI in Windows Server 2008:
Windows Server 2008 Standard provides ONLY a Stand-alone installation
WIndows Server 2008 Enterprise and Datacetner both provide Distrubted Installation.
NOTE: Distributed Installation can provide fault tolerance throughout the enterprise.

It will be exciting to see what the future holds for UDDI implementations with small business seemingly moving away from separate applications for billing/accounting/etc, to an ERP/EDI platform. This may lead to UDDI implementations where the technology can be leveraged to quickly provide information during the transitioning of smaller applications to larger applications, and/or sharing of data between different applications sprinkled throughout the company, and possibly throughout the Internet to clientele as well as to vendor partners.

Sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Description_Discovery_and_Integration
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UDDI
http://uddi.xml.org/

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Xsan 2 will use the hostname to connect to a client, normally this is set correctly but due to some caching issues I had to manually set this via ARD the other day. Enjoy the quick code:

If would you like to contact me with comments or inaccuracies about this article, feel free

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There are certain aspects of Mac OS X Server that it just isn’t that great at. One of them is acting as a router. It’s just a fact that an appliance by SonicWALL, Cisco, Watchguard and sometimes LinkSys will run circles around the speed and feature set of Mac OS X Server. So with that in mind, let’s look at how you would go about configuring a basic port forward on OS X Server if you decided not to listen to us on this point…

You can use the /etc/net/natd.plist. The key you’ll want to edit is the redirect_port, one per port or a range of all in one key… Basically the array would look something like this assuming you were trying to forward afp traffic to 192.168.0.2 from a WAN IP of 4.2.2.2:

redirect_port

You could also use the route command or ipfw depending on exactly what you’re trying to do with this thing. Route is going to be useful if you’re trying to respond to network traffic over a different interface than the default interface.

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As many will already be aware, there’s no NetInfo in Leopard. So where are those pesky account settings stored? Well, local user account settings are now stored in plist files. The plist files are stored in the /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users directory for users or /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/groups folder for groups. Password hashes are stored in the /var/db/shadow/hash folder. Inside each plist file for user accounts you can augment (or create) attributes required in order to perform certain actions. So, for example, if you want to change the location of your home folder you can open the users plist file and search for the home key and edit it’s contents.

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Communication is the transfer or collaboration of thoughts, ideas and plans between individuals. It is essential in the organizational success of most businesses to have various easy to use methods of communication. Today’s communication varies from chatting to video teleconferencing. Combining these forms of communication into a simple easy to use interface or tool can drastically increase the flow of collaboration and communication of staff members.

Microsoft’s Unified Communication Server and Office Communicator comprise a suite of programs and services that allow businesses to integrate most communication platforms into one centralized management console. Unified Communications takes the functionality of outlook and exchange and combines email with VOIP service, voicemail, chatting, faxing and video teleconferencing. Along with the integration of all these services, Unified Communications comes with one tool to rule them all.

Office Communicator gives anyone with a laptop or Windows Mobile Smart phone the ability to switch methods of communication on the fly, without having to worry about loss of communication. This simple tool will give you ability to take your office anywhere in the world as long as you have an Internet connection. It also has the ability to attach additional phone numbers to your main office number. Chatting, faxing, emailing, calling and video teleconferencing have never been so easy.

Unified Communications and Office Communicator provide a new method of centralized communication that when implemented in your company will greatly enhance the flow of communication between the staff at your business.

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