Finally! One of the banes of running Mac OS X Server has been that there is no easy way for users to manage their own vacation messages, which creates a support request every time someone takes a day off. Until now. Mac OS X Server 10.6, “Snow Leopard Server”, includes a web-based interface for users to manage their own vacation messages.

The new feature is implemented via the wiki/blog server. Wiki Server 2 has many new features. One of them is a user-customized home page called “My Page” that displays updated wiki content that the user has access to. My Page is also where the user can enable, schedule, and edit their vacation messages.

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Tunneling VNC over SSH has several benefits. For one, if you are using a non-Mac version of VNC, your traffic is probably going over the network unencrypted. By default, the Mac VNC client encrypts keystrokes, including the login.

Another benefit of using VNC over SSH is that your client Mac may be behind a firewall, which you cannot reach directly. If there is some other host, like maybe the firewall itself, which you can SSH to, then you can use SSH port forwarding to “bounce” your VNC session off of that host and connect from there to your client Mac.

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I’m just starting work on the deployment of a lab full of iMacs and Mac Minis, and I’m going to document the process in a blog post. Not this blog post — this is just the appetizer :).

The plan is to use a modular system image, a method of deployment that is new in OS X Server 10.5, and offers numerous improvements over the old way of system deployment, cloned system images. Some advantages of modular images are:
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I just redeployed this website with WordPress 2.7.1, an updated theme, and a re-focused business identity. I finished my ACSA exams on April 3rd, and since then I’ve been busy working on this new website — design is not my strong point! — and getting involved in some interesting projects at work.

The new site isn’t quite finished, but I felt that it is sufficiently better than the old site, so I decided to deploy it. I’ll be adding features and tweaking the design over the next little while.