This site has been neglected for a little while — sorry about that. This summer was a whirlwind of adventure racing, consulting work, vacationing, and more work. This fall I started down the path of attaining the Apple Certified System Administrator certification, which has been time-consuming, on top of work and life. I wrote the first exam, then realized that I could get two-certs right away by writing the desktop support exam. So I did that, and now I have both the ACTC and ACSP certs.

Unfortunately, the Apple Consultants Network isn’t accepting any new members while system upgrades are taking place. The notice on their "Join" page says it will be closed until November — hopefully that doesn’t mean November ‘09! =)

I have 3 exams left to get the ACSA. I’ll be writing the Directory Services exam before the end of the month. I had hoped to have all of the exams done before the end of the year, but I don’t think I’ll have time for two in December. I’ll be writing at least one exam in January.

So, sorry again for the hanging threads on this blog. I know that some readers were looking forward to the completion of series of articles that I started, but re-creating the setups for those scenarios takes a lot of time that I just don’t have. The good news is that I’m learning the “proper” way to approach these things, so I might actually go back and revise some of the existing articles.

Then again, I have discovered that the documented way doesn’t always work, and I’ve actually referred back to my own articles here to solve issues that came up while following the textbook approach. I feel sorry for the instructors that teach the Apple courses — it must suck when the software chokes on the official procedure that they’re trying to teach! The best way, I suspect, is somewhere in between the official procedure, and the “hacks” that I’ve spelled out in my little tutorials. I’m toying with the idea of doing screencasts for some of this stuff. Stay tuned!

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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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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