I have heard this story it seems over and over again, I also have been the topic of many email horror stories. They usually go like this

“I just setup a new server and within days we were on a corporate email blacklist, I contacted the company in question and asked why are we on your blacklist, why won’t you deliver our email. They shared with me an email log of thousands of emails being sent from my mail server through several legitimate email accounts. I ensured that my server was not an open relay so I asked these users, if they had indeed sent this many emails in one shot without any kind of unsubscribe link in the footer of their email. They had! I was so shocked, now what do I do?”

This is an uncomfortable and very perilous position. You want to allow your users to send email to get their job done however you as a systems administrator need to comply with the “Can Spam Act” passed by the FCC to ensure that email continues to flow. You also have companies out there who will block you for violating this act as a precaution on their part. All the while your users can not be bothered to learn about proper email procedures.

It is a fact that Apple has migrated itself away from MYSQL. It is also a fact that most people who continue to buy Apple Servers have been using MYSQL for some time and have websites or other content that sill relies on this technology. Just because it is not endorsed or pre-configured by Apple however does not mean that it can not be used. On the contrary installing and configuring MYSQL to run on an OSX Lion server is moderately easy and gives greater insight as to how MYSQL works (If your a novice to intermediate MYSQL user like me). Lets get started with a brief walkthrough of how to install MYSQL on an OSX Lion Server.

OSX Server comes pre-packaged with Dovecot one of the best IMAP services out there and one of the most extensible and flexible in my opinion. That is its flexible and extensible as long as you know how to configure Dovecot which most OSX Server Administrators are not. I had a conversation with a co-worker not too long ago about being an OSX Server Administrator and I joked that Apple made great hardware and a great OS but most if not all of the services under the hood for Web, Mail, Mailing Lists, etc… were all borrowed open source technologies and that Apple really does not offer any sort of support base for the open source technologies that they use. However without these pieces of software their entire PR Campaign would hold no water. What I praise Apple for is taking these tools and utilizing them and making them easier to use while leaving the ability to tinker and improve these services.

There has been a lingering issue with running Network Accounts and letting the users of those network accounts use Adobe Acrobat Reader on an OSX Leopard & Snow Leopard server environment for a while. The issue presents itself as a hard crash of Adobe Reader, while the user is trying to use the program. After [...]

I am well aware of how to install and setup SSL certificates in OSX Server but that was not always the case. I am writing this how to for those less experienced who may find this article helpful. There are two types of SSL certificates, that you can use on your OSX Server. Self Signed [...]

I have long been a fan of WordPress and not so much a fan of the search engine functionality that comes boxed with it. As an Apple Systems Admin I have several WordPress websites running on several OSX Servers. One of the sites that I administer finally got to the size to where the search [...]

Open directory on the Mac OSX Server platform is a great directory platform using Kerberos and LDAP however I have found that there are two steps to a flawless directory experience. Since the directory is such a delicate system I find it necessary to create a backup of the OD Master at least once a [...]

We have been using XServes as our primary mail servers at my organization for about two years now, we upgraded from an older Linux system and we could not be happier, since moving over to the 10.6 platform, we have enjoyed almost no email downtime, very easy to manage mail system and of course all [...]

Well if you were like me you were thrilled about the idea of Apples new Snow Leopard Server feature Mobile Access server. So great what is it, what does it do? Well it keeps your private web, ical and mail data secure without the use of a VPN and its really easy to setup. Great [...]

So we upgraded from 10.5.8 Mail server to 10.6.2 and everything went very smoothly. Mailstores were migrated and the transition from Cyrus to Dovecot was great. However once all the email was moved over and all the settings were double, and triple checked. People started complaining that every once in a while their email was [...]

While migrating our servers services from 10.5 to our 10.6.2 production server one of the easiest migrations that I had found was to migrate the 10.5 Wiki. Simply copying files and making sure that the permissions remain in tact are really all you need. However in 10.6.2 there is a detachment from the way you [...]

Before migrating to 10.6 Server we were running our entire mailstore on the 10.5.8 platform. Say what you will about Leopard, once we had it set up correctly it ran fine. We migrated because of the greater benefits of Dovecot over Cyrus. Many of the other features intriqued us as well such as the improved [...]

The DNS interface in Server Admin.app is not suitable for doing a split-horizon DNS configuration. It simply doesn’t expose all of the flexibility of bind that you need to pull off such a configuration. If you poke around the bind config files on your OS X Server, you’ll be able to see how apple has [...]

So like many other organizations mine was finally fed up with Horde as a webmail system. They had used squirrel mail in the past and was unimpressed by the graphical interface but admitted that it while it lacked glamour it always did perform as they would have expected. Before I had started there their mail [...]

Recently I have undergone a massive change, we have decided at our organization to go with Snow Leopard server in place of our Leopard Servers. Knowing that this could be problematic to use Apples built in GUI for migrating data I decided to start with a 100% clean configured Snow Leopard server and slowly start [...]