While the manuals and knowledge-base articles at the main Mac OS X Server site contain much helpful information, I never really got things configured the way I wanted until this past weekend when I stumbled across two papers:

• Autofs: Automatically Mounting Network File Shares in Mac OS X
• Tips and Tricks for Mac Management White Paper

These two really put things in context and filled in some of the gaps from the official manuals. At long last I was able to:

• set up the USB drives that hold music, pictures, and other shared data so that they now automount over AFP when, say, iTunes is launched
• locate and enable the various bits of Workgroup Manager that allow proper assignment of policies (e.g. laptop sleep/wake schedule, Kerberos usage, VPN configuration) across multiple hosts at once...and just better understand how to use WM in general
• force Home Sync to suppress conflict messages and just let the mobile (laptop) accounts win for background syncs

One quirk of automounting that was not covered caused me some grief but was eventually solved after some trial and error. When setting up automounted Share Points via Server Admin, the default is to have them show up under /Network/Servers/hostname/sharename. I wanted them to appear under /Volumes (or /Groups, in one case) to ensure that the paths were the same on all Mac hosts. Choosing the middle two options---to appear under /Network/Applications or /Network/Library---turns out to be a bad idea even if naming weren't an issue because Finder and various other applications (e.g. iPhoto) apparently presume that anything mounted there is read-only (strangely, Terminal and iTunes were able to pick up the shares as read-only). The best bet is to use the last opton, Custom Mount Point, and set the path to be the same as the original. However, after applying these settings I still intermittently had some connection issues---mostly in the form of read-only mounting---that I solved with the following bit of data massaging:

1. Open Workgroup Manager
2. Click the All Record Types button
3. Choose Mounts from the drop-down menu
4. In the mountOption and VFSOpts fields, edit the values to remove ;AUTH=NO%20USER%20AUTHENT@
5. Save and exit (maybe restart AFP for good measure)

The default values written by Server Admin set up the automounts with guest authentication, which seems to be an issue particularly with Kerberos. Also, it is a good idea at this point to comment out the line

 /-            -static

in /etc/auto_master on the server; if that is not done, weird things will happen especially when one of the shared drives is unmounted (say for disk maintenance).

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Also came across some helpful Kerberos stuff:

• Mac OS X Server kerberos setup (from scratch)
• ensuring automatic ticket renewals
• Configure Mac OS X for Kerberos single sign-on authentication

The wiki/blog server provided by Mac OS X Server does not provide any capability to alter the timestamps applied to entries, and while it nominally utilizes the MetaWeblog API it appears to completely ignore any timestamps supplied. This is kind of annoying, as it can be convenient to add time-related notes as entries after the fact.

After some hacking around to figure out where the various entry data are kept in the system, I put together a script that allows me to roll back the creation date (and subsequent update timestamps) for a particular entry:

1. Create the entry
2. After saving, note the unique id value assigned to it
3. Run the script on the server

sudo change_blog_createDate --user <username> <unique_key> <date string>

The date string can be anything that would parse to a valid date via the Perl CPAN modules Date::Manip or DateTime::Format::DateManip; it does not need to be supplied as a single value, all its tokens are joined together by whitespace before parsing.

For a group blog, use

sudo change_blog_createDate --group <groupname> <unique_key> <date string>

Following up on discussions and examples here and here, I created two tools to create and remove hard links to directories on HFS+ filesystems. The code was copied from the discussion sites, but in keeping with the admonitions to be very, very careful in using such links I augmented the code to be a bit more precise. The code for creating a directory link is

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
   if (argc != 3) {
      fprintf(stderr,"Usage: hlink_dir <src_dir> <target_dir>\n");
      return 1;
   }
   struct stat st;
   stat(argv[1], &st);
   if ( st.st_mode & S_IFDIR ) {
      int ret = link(argv[1], argv[2]);
      if (ret != 0) perror("link");
      return ret;
   } else {
      fprintf(stderr,"Usage: hlink_dir <src_dir> <target_dir>\n");
      fprintf(stderr,"<src_dir> must be a directory\n");
      return 2;
   }
}

which was turned into an executable via

gcc -o /usr/local/bin/hlink_dir hlink.c -Wall

and the code for the link remover is

#include <unistd.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
   if (argc != 2) {
      fprintf(stderr,"Usage: unhlink_dir <target_dir>\n");
      return 1;
   }
   struct stat st;
   stat(argv[1], &st);
   if ( st.st_mode & S_IFDIR ) {
      int ret = unlink(argv[1]);
      if (ret != 0) perror("link");
      return ret;
   } else {
      fprintf(stderr,"Usage: unhlink_dir <target_dir>\n");
      fprintf(stderr,"<target_dir> must be a directory\n");
      return 2;
   }
}

which was similarly turned to an executable via

gcc -o /usr/local/bin/unhlink_dir

Followed instructions from Zytrax, OpenLDAP, Linux Gazette, OAV, and a few others to come up with a customized schema and slapd.conf changes to utilize it:

Initially followed the instructions from AFP548 to drop the schema into place and restart, but that didn't work.Discovered that it was best to use ldaptest to process the configurations and generate a new configuration directory (which the OpenLDAP documentation says is preferred over config files now). The procedure to use these files (presumed to be dropped into /tmp) and update the directory is:

launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.openldap.slapd.plist
cd /etc/openldap
cp /tmp/bartonia.schema schema/
for file in slapd.conf slapd_macosxserver.conf
do
  mv $file $file.apple
  cp -p $file.apple $file.bartonia
  patch </tmp/$file.diff
  ln -s $file.bartonia $file
done
mv slapd.d slapd.d.apple
mkdir slapd.d.bartonia
chmod go-rx slapd.d.bartonia
slaptest -v -f slapd.conf -F slapd.d.bartonia
ln -s slapd.d.bartonia slapd.d
slapindex -v
launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.openldap.slapd.plist

(All of the above commands were run as root, either via sudo or by using sudo to open a root shell.)

Loading of entries could commence once the top-level domain and ou entries were added.

1. Added the following lines to AppendToPath
1. /usr/local/lib/perl5
2. /star/Perl/lib/perl5/site_perl
2. Created a custom CPAN configuration in /usr/local/CPAN that sets INSTALL_BASE=/usr/local. Installations and updates of these modules must be proceded by "cd /usr/local; /usr/local/bin/cpan"

Installed MacTeX. Ran Tex Live Utility immediately afterwards to apply updates. Done.

Scisoft was downloaded and installed, primarily because it makes setting up IRAF pretty painless. SAOImage was installed afterwards since Scisoft includes an older version.

Tweaks:

• ln -s /Applications/scisoft/all/Packages /Applications/scisoft/all/packages (needed to avoid some case-sensitivity issues)
• link and copy various paths in /Applications/scisoft/all/Packages/iraf/iraf/local to /Users/iraf

Finally, set up IRAF

1. cd /Applications/scisoft/i386/Packages/x11iraf-1.5DEV
2. ./install

The Homebrew tool has been installed for wrangling Open Source and Public Domain software packages:

1. curl -L http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/tarball/master | tar xz --strip 1 -C /usr/local
2. cd /usr/local
3. brew install git
4. git init
5. git remote add origin git://github.com/mxcl/homebrew.git
6. git pull origin master

Formulae are to be updated from time to time via

1. cd /usr/local
2. git pull origin master

Build Perl 5.10.1 that looks mostly like the 5.10.0 that ships with Mac OS X.

Starting points:

• Perl 5.10.1 source code
• Apple's Perl build files

After some trial-and-error hacking, I figured out what files were being patched and extended in order to build things in the Apple Way. The main adjustments are to tweak the INC path search order and add the ability to use AppendToPath and PrependToPath to make further adjustments to it. The resulting files were captured in the attachment.


The build process is:

1. tar xzf perl-5.10.1.tar.gz -C /tmp
2. cd /tmp/perl-5.10.1.tar.gz
3. tar xzf make_localperl_5.10.1.tar.gz
4. make
5. make install

Afterwards, the CPAN configuration file was set up:


and the AppendToPath file edited:



and then the cpan tool was used to upgrade and add modules.