From paul.suh at ps-enable.com Wed Jun 11 20:58:16 2008 From: paul.suh at ps-enable.com (Paul Suh) Date: Wed Jun 11 20:58:22 2008 Subject: [Newsletter] PACKA-GEm, OD LDAP indexing, Apple Retail and Xsan, MOSXSWebPassword, Training Message-ID: <1AA19512-E86E-4760-A7C4-5B0583B5AF04@ps-enable.com> Folks, It's been a longtime since the previous newsletter because I've been heads down writing code on a new project that just had its official announcement last night. PACKA-GEm --------------- I've done a lot of work with a client configuration management tool called the Casper Suite. It's a great enterprise tool for dealing with pushing out packages and configurations to hundreds of desktops and laptops, running scripts, and a whole lot more. Unfortunately, it's not well suited for organizations with less than 100 or so seats; the costs and complexity make it more trouble than it's worth for such smaller installations. What I've been working on is turning this into a hosted service called PACKA-GEm. For a relatively low monthly fee per computer under management, we will provide the management server; all you need is a local file server to hold the updates. We're in limited alpha testing right now; we're looking at launching the service for real at the end of the summer. For more information, go to: Open Directory LDAP Indexing -------------------------------- If you do a lot of management of computers via Computer Lists, you should look in the /var/log/slapd.log file on your OD master for error messages that look like: > Apr 15 20:31:11 odserver slapd[78]: <= bdb_equality_candidates: > (apple-computers) index_param failed (18)\n > Apr 15 20:31:11 odserver slapd[78]: <= bdb_substring_candidates: > (apple-mcxflags) index_param failed (18)\n These are an indication that the LDAP server is performing searches on non-indexed attributes, and as a result is running more slowly and requiring more CPU power than it might need otherwise. Even if the CPU power of your OD server is not max'ed out, your clients still may be acting erratically because some LDAP queries are taking too long to return. You can add more indices to the slapd configuration to alleviate the problem by performing the following procedure. 1) Shut down the LDAP service: sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ org.openldap.slurpd.xml sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ org.openldap.slapd.xml 2) Edit the config file to add the necessary indices. Add the following lines to /etc/openldap/slapd_macosxserver.conf, down near the end with the other index statements: index apple-computers eq index apple-mcxflags sub 3) Run the slapindex command. sudo slapindex Of interest is the following statement from the slapindex man page: This command provides ample opportunity for the user to obtain and drink their favorite beverage. It actually doesn't take that long, a matter of only a five or ten minutes at most on the ones that I have done, some of which had several thousand entries. 4) Restart the LDAP service sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.openldap.slapd.xml sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ org.openldap.slurpd.xml Xsan and Apple Retail ----------------------- I went by my local Apple retail store the other day; I was in a grumpy mood from trying to do some tricky stuff with Xsan 2 and a load balancer for AFP, so I was a bit sarky when the nice lady who greeted me as I stepped in the door asked me, "is there anything I can help you with today?" I answered, "can you help me figure out why an Xsan volume being shared out via AFP through a load balancer doesn't show up correctly?" Her reply: "The only thing I know about Xsan is that it's the most frequently stolen item from our shelves." I burst out giggling uncontrollably! :-D For the record, the second-most-stolen item is Apple Remote Desktop and the third-most-stolen item is Mac OS X Server. MOSXSWebPassword, v1.5L ---------------------------- I recompiled MOSXSWebPassword, so that it works properly on Leopard. The app hasn't changed significantly under the hood, but the final redirect had to be re-done, as WebObjects was throwing an exception after a successful password change. Leopard's limited admin users may override some of the MOSXSWebPassword functionality, but the web app still is a bit more fine-grained. It's posted to my web site at: Training at Tech 2000 -------------------------------------- I'm teaching the Apple Training courses again at Tech 2000, located in Herndon, VA. You can reach them at Tech 2000, Inc. 459 Herndon Parkway, Suite 8 Herndon, VA 20170 Phone: 703.467.8600 Fax: 703.471.8364 Toll Free Registration Line: 800.433.1482 Sales@t2000inc.com http://www.t2000inc.com/ --Paul Paul Suh http://www.ps-enable.com/ paul.suh@ps-enable.com (240) 672-4212 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: smime.p7s Type: application/pkcs7-signature Size: 2615 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.ps-enable.com/pipermail/newsletter/attachments/20080611/76fe4711/smime.bin