Hello Jon,

I read a few posts of yours regarding 10.6 Groups functionality w/calendar, and I’m hoping really just for your opinion. And if you’re just too busy, I understand that, as well, but maybe you can take a couple of minutes and humor me!

For what it’s worth, in a former life I was a much more in-the-trenches Mac tech and developer (pre X), and now am just a semi-power user. As a complete aside, I’m
also a former Now Up To Date & Contact evangelist, and I sorely miss a lot of what that product had right out of the box.

So, that said, I run 10.5.8 Server, and really need to share Calendars andContacts, using Groups for permissions. The CalDav server works pretty well, great with iCal, kind of cumbersome to set up paths with Sunbird on Windows boxes, but works. The Wiki cal…was pretty disappointing in that it only displayed the primary calendar. And for all the meandering I’ve attempted with Groups, it hasn’t really gotten me to a good end, and client setup is again, cumbersome.

I do like the idea of Win users (or anyone, especially remotely) being able to just open a browser and view multiple calendars, for obvious reasons, as opposed to using an application (Sunbird) and setting up a half dozen calendars and paths, for instance. For this reason I’ve dabbled with Google Apps, using their shared Cals, and iCal as client for my Mac users, etc. This works quite well…no Groups permissions per se, but at least easy to assign per calendar privileges to individuals, and thereby pretty easy for individuals to log in and see all. I’ve messed with Google Groups, and again, got a little cumbersome. Worked, but cumbersome.

I ALSO very much need a good Shared Contacts solution, and Google (and everyone) still fails badly on this score, as far as I can tell. It appears that 10.6 Server will do what I need it to via CardDav, hopefully…?

SO THE QUESTION IS…should I bite the $500 bullet and buy 10.6 Server? Specifically, to your knowledge:

1) Does Address Book sharing really work now? As in, the ability to specify Groups you do or do not want shared? I’d thought 10.5 was supposed to, but was disappointed to find out it was strictly LDAP-related. So once bitten, twice shy. If it does work well, that might be reason enough for me to make the switch, even if I kept using Google calendars…

2) That said, does iCal Server now actually work with Groups, for real, for assigning Group privileges and access?!

3) …and if so, can you now use a browser to view multiple calendars, assuming you have proper Group privileges?! Or a CalDav client?

If you’ve gotten through this, thank you sincerely. Honestly, any thoughts are appreciated. When I was more ‘in the game’ I had a big network of coders and developers to chat out things like this, but now I’m pretty much out of the fold.

Sincerely,

Karl Zarling

However in 10.6.2 there is a detachment from the way you authenticate. You create access for each blog based on the settings in the web interface rather than in Workgroup Manager. This threw me off a bit the first time due to the fact that I had already had our previous wiki server split up into groups using workgroup manager.

Here is how I migrated our wiki, the default directory for wiki and blogs on 10.5 and 10.6 is

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/Library/Collaboration

Inside that folder, you’ll find a Groups folder of interest. You’ll want to repeat the following procedure for each group:

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sudo serveradmin stop teams
sudo mv <Group Folder from Backup> /Library/Collaboration/Groups/
sudo chown -R _teamsserver:_teamsserver /Library/Collaboration/Groups/<group_directory>
sudo rm /Library/Collaboration/dataVersion.plist
sudo rm /Library/Collaboration/globalIndex.db
sudo rm /Library/Application Support/Apple/WikiServer/directoryIndex.db
sudo serveradmin start teams

Once you complete those steps, you’ll need to login as an administrator and set the permissions for the wiki(s). 10.6 removes the privileges for wikis from Workgroup Manager and instead allows for security management via the wiki web interface.

Once we were done with the wiki, we had to migrate over DNS this was a little bit scary however retyping our DNS records was equally as scary. I decided to try to migrate the settings since it was sanctioned by Apple.

Basically the first step was to stop DNS service on your Snow Leopard server. I then created a backup of my DNS config files that lived on my Snow Leopard server in the event that everything went bad.

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mkdir /var/backups/dns; cp -r /etc/dns /var/named /etc/named.conf /var/backupsdns

I then preceded to copy the following files and folders from Leopard server into the same locations on Snow Leopard Server

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/etc/dns
/etc/named.conf
/var/named

Once done start DNS via the command line on Snow Leopard server

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sudo serveradmin start dns

Next I urge you if you are going to try this test, test, test, test and test again. I got it almost 100% however there are a few fields in the DNS settings in Server Admin that do not exist in 10.5 Server. Also I did notice that it messed up my FQDN’s in some places. Tell me your migration headache story, or lack thereof.