Apple’s Server Admin tool is the heart of the OS X Server experience, allowing you to do observe and administer servers from any location with a laptop and an internet connection. There are times, though, when you don’t even have that available. If you have an iPhone, you can still check in on the operation of essential systems with Harlekins’ Server Admin Remote.

Let’s say you can’t figure out where some enormous application hides its licensing information, what system files are getting altered by a third-party installer, or even just where some non-standard preferences are getting squirreled away. There are lots of ways to distribute settings to multiple machines, but far fewer to determine what those settings are and how they’re stored. What you need is a way to see what files system changes are taking place. The easiest way is with FSEventer from fernLighting.

If you’re responsible for more than a handful of Macintosh workstations, you can’t get away with running from desk to desk with a firewire drive anymore. IT departments are getting the call to do more with less, and consultants who still charge time-and-materials aren’t getting called at all. For years now, Apple has stressed the .pkg format for mass deployment of their own software. If you’re responsible for deploying third-party applications, on the other hand, the best tool on the market right now might just be JAMF Software’s Composer 7.

With the end of the year growing close, the nights growing long, and a foot of snow paralyzing a completely unprepared Seattle, our thoughts here at Make Mac Work turn to all the gifts we’ve received this year to make our jobs easier.

In the late eighties, the original Stuffit was an invaluable utility, bringing compression and archiving capabilities to the Macintosh filesystem. In Mac OS X, however, you could soon right-click on any file or folder to create a cross-platform .zip file with the “Make Archive” feature (now called “Compress” in Leopard). While the need to compress files with Stuffit passed long ago, the need to “unstuff” old archives has never disappeared. The Unarchiver can open .sit files, as well as more than thirty other legacy formats (such as Disk Doubler and BinHex), and does it all for free.

Since Mac OS X premiered in 2001, a wide range of applications have shipped with installers in Apple’s .pkg format. While the contents of these installers were originally browsable in the Finder or from the command line, determining exactly what will be installed (and where) can still be a difficult and time-consuming process. It’s made all the more frustrating by the fact that .pkginstallers lack an uninstall option, making such detective work a requirement to completely uninstall some third-party software. And in Leopard, there’s a new “flat package” format, which can’t even be read without Apple’s Developer Tools.

We’ve written about launchd (the daemon which governs OS X system processes) before. We’ve detailed its xml-based syntax, even as we’ve struggled to remember every tag and attribute. We could have saved ourselves the trouble and pointed to Peter Borg’s Lingon, the free graphical editor for launchd plist files.

For years, systems administrators have used SFTP (the SSH File Transfer Protocol) to provide secure access to remote file systems. Based not on FTP, but on the Unix Secure Shell, SFTP allows the encrypted transfer of files over any network. While SFTP’s command options and version compatibility can make it a complicated tool, Magnetk’s ExpanDrive makes it easy to appreciate, offering Macintosh users a near-flawless way to mount and access remote servers as local disks.

When you blew last year’s budget on a brand new SAN, its potential seemed second only to its simplicity: As demand grows, add capacity from a huge storage pool, and never have to worry about individual hard drives again. When you increase the allocation to the Mac share, however, your workstations still see the same amount of space. Unlike Leopard, Mac OS X 10.4 can’t natively or dynamically increase partition size, and no version of Apple’s Disk Utility can resize NTFS or Linux partitions.