The sales team need VPN for travel. The finance department needs Windows File Sharing. Freelancers need to deliver work via FTP, but they shouldn’t ever be able to log in from the console. Your server needs to offer a variety of services, but you don’t want to offer every service to every user with an account. Using the access panel built into the Server Admin application, you can set finely grained controls over which users and groups can utilize which services.

While never technically required (though often politically desirable), hiding local administrative accounts on Leopard workstations and laptops is one of the most popular requests we receive from IT personnel. The most common scenario is removing a pre-existing administrative account from view. This is a typical approach when building a disk image for manual cloning or installation via NetInstall, and in this article we’ll take a look at the steps it requires.

Disk mirroring, where data is written to two disks simultaneously, is a great low cost method to protect against single-disk failure and improve read-intensive performance. Apple’s Disk Utility provides an easy way to set two disks up as a RAID mirror prior to installation. Once the operating system has been installed, though, OS X can’t mirror an existing drive without completely reformatting. Unless, of course, you choose to do some from the command line.

Just because solving a problem is easy doesn’t mean it’s an easy problem. The issue of “corrupted” or out-of-spec font files causing operating system or application crashes is a long-standing thorn in the side of Mac users and administrators. That’s because font files are software that interacts directly with the OS, but that software is often judged (and purchased) on aesthetic, rather than technical, grounds. While the problem of bad font software isn’t likely to go away any time soon, it’s at least possible to solve the problem of locating and removing those files.