I’m just starting work on the deployment of a lab full of iMacs and Mac Minis, and I’m going to document the process in a blog post. Not this blog post — this is just the appetizer :).

The plan is to use a modular system image, a method of deployment that is new in OS X Server 10.5, and offers numerous improvements over the old way of system deployment, cloned system images. Some advantages of modular images are:
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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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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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Adding Leopard’s LDAP Container Objects to the UNIX LDAP Server

In the first article in this series, I described how to get the schema data out of Leopard and into a Sun ONE Directory Server. In this article, I’ll describe how to get the container objects out of Leopard’s LDAP server, and add them to the UNIX directory. These container objects will hopefully hold data relevant for assigning access to Apple’s Blog & Wiki server, among other things.

I say “hopefully” because I’m writing as I go, and I don’t know how it will turn out. However, given that others have had success at employing this method to get NFS automounting home directories working from Solaris LDAP, there is good reason to believe that it will work for other OSX services as well.

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