For the past few years I’ve suffered this seemingly random problem when connecting to a Solaris or Mac OS X server via SSH: the connection would take forever to negotiate. It would connect, exchange keys, but then pause for up to a minute, plus or minus eternity, before proceeding with authentication. I finally took some time to figure out how to make it go away. Here’s what I did.

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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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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 documentation for setting up sieve on Mac OS X server is sparse, at best:

To enable Sieve support:
1. Add the following entry in /etc/services/:
sieve 2000/tcp #Sieve mail filtering
2. Reload the mail service.

Right. This will enable the service, but it doesn’t configure it. This short article describes how to do both.

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