I just started getting back into Ruby on Rails, after a hiatus while I battled with Leopard server. I discovered that setting up my Rails development environment in Leopard wasn’t as perfectly straightforward as it was in Tiger.

I installed the binary distribution of MySQL, and proceeded to install the mysql ruby gem to connect to it. First, the build failed because it didn’t know where to look for the mysql client libraries, then it failed again because by default the Makefile tries building for both PPC and Intel architectures.

To make a long story short, the solution is to add an ARCHFLAGS environment variable specifiying your architecture, and to provide the path to mysql_config on the command line. For the former, add:

ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386"

To your /etc/bashrc (assuming you use the default shell, bash), and open a new terminal or run ‘bash’. If you’re on PPC architecture, change “i386″ to “ppc”. Then try the gem again with the path to mysql_config appended, like so:

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

That is all on one line.

Kerberos and Single Sign-on in Leopard Server

It has been awhile since my last post of this series — sorry to keep you waiting. Kerberos on Mac OS X Server is a finicky thing, and it took me this long to get it working! Well, I did take a 3 week vacation, and was busy with other projects for at least 2 weeks … but it was a major pain in the ass to set up, and I’m not yet entirely satisfied.

To get straight to the point, the following procedure got kerberos with single sign-on up and running for me. Hopefully it will work for you too.

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The documentation for setting up sieve on Mac OS X server is sparse, at best:

To enable Sieve support:
1. Add the following entry in /etc/services/:
sieve 2000/tcp #Sieve mail filtering
2. Reload the mail service.

Right. This will enable the service, but it doesn’t configure it. This short article describes how to do both.

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