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.

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.

Last week in part one of this article, we learned how to configure a single OS X Server to provide DNS. This week, we’ll look at providing redundancy with a secondary DNS server and configure our client machines to receive our new DNS settings.

Without DNS, the domain name system that translates computer names to IP numbers, most networks would fall apart completely. As well as directing traffic on the internet, DNS is used for name-based routing in corporate environments, and especially for machines (like laptops) which can span the two. With Apple’s recent focus on URL-based protocols, and despite the popularity of LAN-based systems like Bonjour, the ability to configure internal DNS properly is an essential skill. In this two-part article, we’ll look at how to do just that.

For a much-ballyhooed feature when Leopard premiered, iCal Server has had a checkered history, dangerously unstable for its first few minor updates and providing little more than database corruption, frustration, and an excuse to use the word “ballyhooed”. Now that things have calmed down, many companies are experimenting with the service to see if it’s ready for production.

OS X Server offers an extremely simple system to manage account preferences, at least those user preferences predefined by Apple. Systems administrators, however, typically find themselves needing to control application settings that haven’t been singled out in Workgroup Manager.

Backing up client machines to a specially-provisioned network share is one of the marquee features of Leopard Server. Unfortunately, it’s a feature with far more promise than documentation. When it works, it’s a dream, finally freeing you from an aging Retrospect setup (or worse). When it fails, though, it tends to do so without much insight as to what’s gone wrong. If you can’t get Time Machine backing up to a server, you’ll get plenty of detail as to why. Once a machine stops backing up properly, though, there’s no real indication as to how you might get it working again.

If you’ve tried to upgrade Tiger server to Leopard, you’ve probably already learned that it’s a bumpy road. The process is so fraught with bugs that Apple themselves recommend against it in their Server Essentials manual, stating it should never be preformed on “production” machines. Unfortunately, not every organization has a spare XServe to experiment on, and those sharing files off internal disks may not want the hours of data shuffling that installing from scratch would entail.

One of the best features of OS X is the built-in ability to clone a customized installation to other machines. By creating a .dmg image of an existing installation in Disk Utility, then using the “Restore” feature to copy it to another disk, you can install a pre-configured OS onto any number of Macintosh workstations.

Aside from the files an OS X Server shares across your entire enterprise, there’s often the desire within individual workgroups to have private storage areas for their own projects. These group folders are essential for departments like HR and Accounting, but they can also be helpful for less security-conscious groups as a staging area before sharing their final work company-wide. Fortunately, while the process of creating these file shares isn’t obvious, it also isn’t complicated.