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{ Category Archives } Server Side

Including Twitter on a web page

The Twitter link itself is almost trivial

Spam and more spam

When I first set up the junkmail accounts on MacOS X Server, I came across some web pages describing problems that people had been having with it. Details are also given here: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/SpamAssassin_on_Mac_OS_X_Server Probably the most visible problem was that the spamassassin configuration file supplied used obsolete keywords, from a previous version. This is /etc/mail/spamassassin/local.cf. […]

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ssh login without password

I need to make a note of this, as I keep on looking it up on the web. Here’s the situation: you want to automate access to a server from your private machine, and are prepared to give up the security of the password prompt to get this extra benefit. If so, use this: ssh-keygen […]

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Scheduled Tasks – launchd

For a long time I have used crontab for almost all scheduled tasks, with a few diversions into /etc/rc and other such Unix techniques. With Tiger, Apple created launchd, which is intended to unify these, as well as inetd and Apple’s previous (and largely ignored) attempt at the problem, StartupItems. Here are a few pointers […]

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MySQL Backup and Restore

So my next task was to move a forum from the old server to the new one. Download phpBB from http://www.phpbb.com and copy the expanded tar-ball to the web folder, then follow the standard installation instructions (which involve setting permissions appropriately for security and editing config.php). That part is easy enough. Creating a backup from […]

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Blogging

As I write this, I am (still) in the middle of implementing the MacOS X Server blogging tools. I have used everything from TextEdit (formerly Edit.app) to blosxom and even LiveJournal and my own custom content management systems to manage content, so I am understandably nervous about using a system that, judicious reading of the […]

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Migrating Mail

My current server runs FreeBSD, sendmail, and cyrus IMAP. I experimented with an old (more than 5 years) webmail package, but that hasn’t been in use for some time. It has a procmail mailer of my own devising to handle some primitive spam filtering, but that really doesn’t cut it any more. Moving to MacOS […]

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Mail Autoresponders (vacation)

MacOS X has had some strange changes made to it recently. Take vacation, for instance. I believe that the version used by MacOS X came from the sendmail distribution, which is perhaps the reason that it has vanished from recent versions of MacOS X. The net effect is that creating a simple autoreply vacation message […]

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Zeroconf (Bonjour/Rendezvous) on Linux

One of the small advantages of running MacOS X is the ability to refer to machines that aren’t represented in (a static) DNS and have dynamic IP address by a simple name. Now that we are moving away from a FreeBSD/Solaris server setup to a MacOS X one, there is still some advantage to using […]

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Mac OS X Server 10.4 – Administering DNS

The scenario that I want to support is that of a typical small Internet-aware company. We run several domains, some customer domains acting as a DNS service provider for them, some private vanity domains, and one recording our main servers including our (self managed) mail service. Our ISP provides secondary DNS service and secondary MX […]

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