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.

So imagine the surprise when you’ve configured and started the service, but your client machines simply won’t connect. In fact, they complain there’s a username or password error, when the username and password work fine for other services. Check the logs in Server Admin, and all you’ll find is an ominous message:

The selected logfile does not exist.

In some Leopard Server installations, the iCal Server logfiles aren’t ever created properly. The result is that the server process starts, but doesn’t do anything because it has no place to log its actions. It’s the sort of problem you’d usually figure out by digging through log files, but because they don’t exist, iCal Server just sits there dumbly, unable to provide any clues.

The easy way to stop this serpent from eating its own tail is to create and properly permission the files, then restart the iCal service. Open the Terminal, and type:

cd /var/log/caldavd/
sudo touch access.log error.log
sudo chmod 640 access.log
sudo chmod 644 error.log

The touch command creates the required logs, while chmod is used to set their permissions. With the log files now in their expected place, client machines should have no trouble connecting to iCal Server.