This article will show you how to dramatically improve the effectiveness of the anti-spam system that is built into Mac OSX Server 10.5. After the upgrade, at least 99.9% of spam should be prevented from reaching your user’s e-mail Inboxes.

This process requires that the Developer Tools are installed on the system. As always, backup your server before making any changes.

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Although Apple published a helpful list of TCP and UDP port numbers used by it’s products, it’s a little unclear as to which ones Workgroup Manager needs.

You can figure it out yourself by enabling firewall logging on your Mac OSX Server and watching as you fail to connect. Or, you can take my word for it — here are the ports that you need to allow access to:

1. TCP 625 for “Remote Directory Access”, as mentioned on the above page.
2. TCP 8175.

For the last port, the only option in the Server Admin firewall interface is to enable ports 8000-8999 for “Web Service, iTunes Radio streams”. If you are running other services on those ports that you want to protect, or if you’re just paranoid, you’ll want to add a custom rule for port 8175.
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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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