Picking up where the last article left off, this article looks at setting up the mail service in Leopard, including migrating mail data from Tiger.

Configuring the Mail Service

In the Server Admin application, I jumped right to the Settings part of the Mail section and filled out things appropriately. In the “Domain name” field I entered the fully qualified domain name of the server in its role as a mail server; this is the same address that is in the MX records in DNS. For example, “mail.netmojo.ca”.

The “Host name” field contains the fully qualified domain name of the server itself. “leopardserver.netmojo.ca”, for example.

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In Part One, I described the installation of Mac OS X Server 10.5, and the migration of settings from my old 10.4 Server to the new one, for a couple of services. In this article, I’ll go through the importing of user accounts and data from 10.4 (Tiger) to 10.5 (Leopard).

Migrating User Accounts From LDAP

The method that Apple recommends in their Upgrading and Migrating manual is to select user accounts in Workgroup Manager (WGM), and choose Export from Server menu. This creates a comma-delimited text file of your user account data which can be imported with WGM in Leopard. However, the passwords are left out of the export.

Note: The method I describe below is the hard way. Please see the comments after the article for a discussion on the easy way: use OD’s backup & restore capability. If the new server has different DNS and IP address settings, there are special steps, as discussed in the comments.

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Information on the stability, or lack thereof, of Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) Server seems to be a bit scarce. One reason for this is probably that experienced system administrators will wait a few months, until the initial bugs are discovered and patched, before deploying a new operating system — any new operating system. This is just good practice.

Good practice never gets in the way of those with little to no experience in system administration though. To help that crowd enter a world of pain, Apple promotes their new server product with alluring proclamations like:

If you think it takes a dedicated IT department to deploy and use a server, think again. Leopard Server is designed so you can easily set up and manage servers.

Don’t let this fool you. Mac OSX Server is a real UNIX server, and its services and configuration options are sophisticated and complex.

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