If you’ve ever had to troubleshoot a Mac OS X machine, you probably know how invaluable the system logs can be. By simply opening the Console application in the Utilities folder, you can browse the information logged by almost any process on the machine. But how can you compare that data over a large number of systems, or look at the logs for a machine that isn’t right in front of you? It’s simply a matter of properly configuring syslogd.

You’re looking for an email invitation you sent months ago, but the option to search through each “Entire Message” in Mail is grayed out entirely. Instead, you search iCal for the appointment itself, only to find the results are empty. Thinking you have the minutes stored somewhere on your hard drive, you try searching in the Finder but discover that even items displayed in open windows can’t be located. Spotlight indexing has broken on your local machine.

In many ways, OS X 10.5.7 is a huge improvement for Leopard users, enhancing Finder network reliability, iCal server interaction, and portable home directory performance. In a managed Open Directory environment, however, it may also have the unfortunate side effect of locking you out of your legacy PowerPC machines.