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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I recently setup the so-called “MAMP” (MacOSX, Apache2, MySQL and PHP) on my laptop, so I can have a portable web development environment. I decided to use MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts) for Apache2 and PHP5, which makes things a lot easier. There were a few “gotchas” though, so I thought I’d share what I learned. If you want an installation completely based on MacPorts builds, this site has some good instructions.

I went with the binary installation package from MySQL.com, instead of using the MacPorts version, for aesthetic reasons: it comes with a cool preference panel component for starting and stopping the server (click the thumbnail to the right for a larger image). Using this version instead does require a slight tweak to get the MacPorts packages to link to it, but its easy to do.

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