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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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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