Random Ramblings

Dear Santa(steve jobs),

I’d like a 12″ mac laptop with solid state HDD to replace my aging x40.

I’d also like better patch mangement other than SU.

Regards,

Faithful apple user and reseller.

In the words of Genesis and Phill Collins - Something in the air tonight ;)  All pun intended.. I’ll be to Thursday, try the veil…

Tags: Apple by ptiggerdine
No Comments »

My new job exposes me to the inner workings of Apple OS X Server on a very intamit basis. Alot of the times I’m doing work that isn’t well documentated or isn’t as quite straight forward as is says in the book. This means I generally have to hand edit configurations in OS X Server. From these experiences I’d like to see the following addressed.

1. Remove bootpd as the DHCP server and replace it with ISC DHCP. I could talk quite litterley talk for days on this issue along. Tftpbooting other OS’s would be easier, (secure) dynamic DNS would make any admin’s life easier.
2. Allow custom configurations of services. Imagine your trying to secure bind in OS X and decide on using views or even just allow replication of 1 or 2 zones. As soon as you goto serveradmin to restart the services it decides to rewrite the configuration. Also add ipv6 localhost zone to the default setup.
3. Create an API for serveradmin. I think the Server Monitor and serveradmin are great utilities for OS X Server but it could be better if the community could add to it with other plugins for other services ( think Mysql, PostgreSQL,oracle,asterisk,etc….).
4. Include sasl tools.. Actually inlcude all tools to any technology that’s used, particularly those that are GPL.. There should be a law against not including debug tools.
5. Remove dashboard,iTunes and quicktime (unless the server is configured for streaming server)for the server installs. This is just extra crap that isn’t needed in a server install and takes up RAM and cpu cycles.

All in all it’s not a big ask. Please Apple. Think about sysadmins

Tags: OS X, Apple by ptiggerdine
No Comments »