This site has been neglected for a little while — sorry about that. This summer was a whirlwind of adventure racing, consulting work, vacationing, and more work. This fall I started down the path of attaining the Apple Certified System Administrator certification, which has been time-consuming, on top of work and life. I wrote the first exam, then realized that I could get two-certs right away by writing the desktop support exam. So I did that, and now I have both the ACTC and ACSP certs.

Unfortunately, the Apple Consultants Network isn’t accepting any new members while system upgrades are taking place. The notice on their "Join" page says it will be closed until November — hopefully that doesn’t mean November ‘09! =)

I have 3 exams left to get the ACSA. I’ll be writing the Directory Services exam before the end of the month. I had hoped to have all of the exams done before the end of the year, but I don’t think I’ll have time for two in December. I’ll be writing at least one exam in January.

So, sorry again for the hanging threads on this blog. I know that some readers were looking forward to the completion of series of articles that I started, but re-creating the setups for those scenarios takes a lot of time that I just don’t have. The good news is that I’m learning the “proper” way to approach these things, so I might actually go back and revise some of the existing articles.

Then again, I have discovered that the documented way doesn’t always work, and I’ve actually referred back to my own articles here to solve issues that came up while following the textbook approach. I feel sorry for the instructors that teach the Apple courses — it must suck when the software chokes on the official procedure that they’re trying to teach! The best way, I suspect, is somewhere in between the official procedure, and the “hacks” that I’ve spelled out in my little tutorials. I’m toying with the idea of doing screencasts for some of this stuff. Stay tuned!

The wiki/blog server in Mac OS X Server is a boon for collaboration between groups with simple needs. It provides easy posting of text, images and other files on wikis and blogs. However, it has a few drawbacks. To improve security on the blogs and wikis, Apple set up filters to allow only a limited set of simple HTML tags in the user-generated content - the rest are automatically removed. For private servers, where the users are authenticated and trusted, this is needlessly limiting. Here’s how to disable that feature.

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I recently installed and configured GNU Mailman on Solaris 10 and found the documentation a little lacking, so here are a few tips that you may find useful.

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