Macintosh-Admin

If you hadn’t heard the fervent rumors over the past few weeks about Apple’s impending tablet computer, you’ll no doubt hear about the real deal: the iPad. It’s a mid-size, thin, fast, multi-touch tablet computer running an enhanced version of the iPhone OS and including Bluetooth, WiFi, and optional 3G connectivity. I’ll leave you to watch the video or drool over the specs & pricing.

Since I’m on-call 24/7 and must be ready to respond whether I’m on the couch or on a long trip, my primary workstation is the thin & light MacBook Air. I certainly wouldn’t mind carrying just an iPad with me wherever I went, but there are a few caveats for a server admin like me. While the iPhone OS’s copy & paste support is stellar and was worth the wait, the lack of multitasking could certainly make life more tedious in some cases or downright impossible in others. The iPad supports current iPhone/iPod touch applications at their existing resolutions (or at 2x size) and I have no doubt that the developers of SSH apps and such will update them to support the new resolution & keyboards quite quickly, but there are key apps missing. They’ve developed excellent new versions of the iWork apps for use on the iPad, but I’d need them to port Server Admin, Workgroup Manager, and Apple Remote Desktop for me to actually give up my MacBook Air.

It’s sexy. It has the potential. It certainly has the screen resolution and performance to take on such tasks. I’ll even guarantee that plenty of third-party tools will be developed for server admins using the iPad, but I hope Apple sees the light and brings over their own admin tools as well.

While Jimmy has previously covered disabling MySQL’s binary logging for those who don’t need it and don’t want to worry about the unexpected disk space usage, others prefer to merely purge older binary logs to reclaim disk space. MySQL’s binary logs live in /var/mysql and appear as mysql-bin.000001. Some of my servers merely hosting a few weblogs have bin logs taking up 4K-1MB, but others hosting large web applications have bin logs in the 1GB range. The last thing you want is for the drive hosting your MySQL databases to fill up unexpectedly.

Here’s a one-liner for removing all MySQL bin logs older than 30 days:

sudo find /var/mysql -name "mysql-bin.0*" -mtime +30 -exec rm {} +

Obviously, any command like this that automates deletion of potentially needed data could be disastrous, so make sure you have a good backup of your data before you try it. The benefit of the above command is that you can remove ‘-exec rm {} +‘ from the end of it to do a dry-run without actually removing any files and it’ll merely list the file names. Also, if you want preserve all bin logs newer than 60 days, simply change to read ‘-mtime +60‘, or whatever best fits your needs.

Depending on your usage & backup setup, you could certainly automate this using cron or launchd.

macminicolo.net has posted their 2009 state of the Mac mini, including their test drive and photos (un-boxing & take-apart) of the new Mac mini w/Snow Leopard Server. Interesting tidbits I was unaware of are:

• The new Mac minis will accept 8GB of RAM and the now-previous ones only need a firmware upgrade to do so.
• AppleCare covers GUI-based server & network management issues for the Mac mini w/Snow Leopard Server, but “isn’t the case if you buy a Mac mini and Snow Leopard Server separately.”
• Approximately 70% of their customers use Mac OS X client. I shouldn’t be surprised due the former pricing, but I think the killer combination of Snow Leopard Server only costing $499 for unlimited clients and bundling it with a Mac mini configuration will change all of that.

They also remind the naysayers who complain about lack of additional Ethernet ports “that Apple’s USB Ethernet Adapter works fine on a mini. Just plug it in and you’re set.”

[Via Daring Fireball]

As of today, OpenDNS has added Deluxe & Enterprise plans to it’s free Basic service. I’ve been using OpenDNS’s free service for quite some time now and it does a good job of offering reliable, fast DNS with a few added bonuses such as phishing & botnet protection, typo correction, content filtering (if needed), and stats.

The Deluxe plan starts at $9.95/year, is ad-free, and includes the following features above and beyond Basic:

• Up to 50 whitelist/blacklist domains (up from 25)
• A whitelist-only mode
• Advanced customization options
• Archived stats & logs for 1 year (up from 2 weeks)
• Email technical support 9-5 (Pacific) on weekdays (in addition to opendns.com/support)

According to the press release, “Notable features included in OpenDNS Enterprise include”:

Malware Site Protection to secure networks from online threats, Delegated Administration to allow multiple administrators across multiple locations to administer accounts, Block-Page Bypass functionality, which makes OpenDNS cloud-based Web content filtering more flexible and allows administrators and trusted individuals to bypass filtering when necessary, and more comprehensive reporting and statistics offerings, including a daily PDF report of network activity delivered via email.

Obviously, that’s in addition to the Basic & Deluxe features. You’ll have to call for Enterprise pricing.

[Via OpenDNS]

Along with other new products and a refresh of the Mac mini line, Apple has now come to their senses and is offering a Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server! For $999 you get a Mac mini w/2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM, and—get this—the optical drive has been ditched to make room for a second hard drive, so two 500GB 2.5″ 5400-RPM SATA hard drives. Oh, and Snow Leopard Server, of course.

It seems like this is going to be a great deal, especially assuming that the $599 Mac mini is spec’d with 2.26GHz processor, 2GB RAM, and $160GB hard drive, and SuperDrive. I’ve been using a Mac mini as a server for years and would love to add one of these to my network.

Update: They note that you can use the MacBook Air SuperDrive (USB) if you need an optical drive. I’ve always found a MacBook in FireWire Target Disk mode to be more than adequate, in a pinch.

Topicdesk has updated their spamtrainer utility to version 1.9.5 adding Snow Leopard Server compatibility. spamtrainer automates the process of training SpamAssassin’s bayes database by allowing users to redirect spam & ham messages to designated mailboxes which are used as training material.

[Via Topicdesk Newsletters]

For those of you who have a Twitter addiction (or even those who manage to only take healthy doses) and haven’t discovered this fact already, you can follow @macintoshadmn for the latest updates around here. We’re too busy for a ton of chatter so you’ll mostly see the automated posting of new articles, but if there’s something important we’ll let you know.

No worries if you’re not into Twitter, there’s also our RSS feed. Get in touch if you have any questions, suggestions, or submissions.

Tags: macintosh-admin, twitter

It’s official, Apple has announced that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and Snow Leopard Server will be available this Friday, August 28^th. Pricing on Unlimited-Client is now $499 and 10-Client appears to have gone the way of the Dodo.

Now that the ship-date has been set, you won’t be able to get it free with a new enrollment to the Apple Maintenance Program for Mac OS X Server, as mentioned regarding pre-ordering, but if you already have an AMP enrollment then you should get the upgrade shipped to you. Of course, if you purchased a qualifying Xserve on or after June 8^th then you can get it for $9.95 via the Up-to-Date Program.

Apple released Security Update 2009-004 yesterday to fix an issue with the DNS Service:

By sending a maliciously crafted update message to the BIND DNS server, a remote attacker may be able to interrupt the BIND service. The issue affects servers which are masters for one or more zones, regardless of whether they accept updates[...] This update addresses the issue by properly rejecting messages with a record of type ‘ANY’ where an assertion would previously have been raised.

BIND is disabled by default in Mac OS X & Server, but if you’ve got the DNS Service enabled you’ll want to apply this update. Grab it for Leopard or Tiger Server (Universal) or pick it up via Software Update. It’s also available for Mac OS X client.

[Via Topicdesk]

Amazon has Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Server, which is set to ship sometime in September, available for pre-order for $499.

Of course, there are actually three ways to get Snow Leopard Server:

• $499.00 through the aforementioned pre-order
• $9.99 through Apple’s Mac OS X Up-to-Date Program if you purchased a qualifying Xserve on June 8^th or later
• Free^* through the Apple Maintenance Program (AMP) if purchased before the official announcement of Snow Leopard Server’s shipping date

* – AMP itself costs either $499 or $999 for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Server 10-Client or Unlimited Client enrollments, respectively, but provides all OS updates (including major updates such as Snow Leopard Server) for 36 months.