OS X Snow Leopard Server and Windows Machines

Hello! My wife's company is using Windows on a network. Is it possible to use a Mac server to control these? They will be eventually switching over, but are stuck with windows for the time being. We are hoping not to have to buy a windows server because they will be switching to Mac anyways. Am I making any sense?

Not a ton But to answer what I believe is your question. OS X Server can run as a Primary Domain Controller. This is not the same as an Active Directory domain controller. However, for many environments running pre Windows 7, this means that OS X Server can act as the sole directory container and all workstations (Windows, Mac, many flavors of Linux) can be bound into the OS X Server for single directory management. By the way, the community appears to have found a way to join Win 7 systems as well.
However, the easiest way of doing this may be to keep your Windows servers and move to Mac clients. Some of the questions that you need to be asking is will OS X Server be able to replace all the features currently in use on the Windows machine? How are you accounting for groupware, backup, disaster recovery, etc? Have you evaluated all of your software needs? Have you looking into physical security and data protection?
The rage is to go Mac. But it is not a panacea. Mac systems require the same amount of thought and consideration in design that a Windows environment does. Do you generally have fewer issues with Macs... sure. But don't think that everything will just magically work because there is an Apple logo on it.

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Where can I find info on how to install and run Snow Leopard Server as virtual machine inside Mountain Lion

Where can I find info on how to install and run Snow Leopard Server as virtual machine inside Mountain Lion

Here is the short answer:
Installing Snow Leopard Server into Parallels 10 for DUMMIES:
http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=17285039&postcount=564

I transferred files from a NAS server to the Mac Mini Snow Leopard Server and now some of the files have Custom Access and can't be opened by some users. How do I fix this?

We're setting up our Mac Mini Snow Leopard Server, and in the process transferred files that had been stored and accessed from our Blackarmor NAS server over to the Mac. These files were all created on PC's and are Office Excel files, WordPerfect files or PDF's. When you look at the files on the Mac from the Mac and bring up Get Info for the affected file, it says that the file has Custom Access. The files that work properly don't have that configuration. I can access and open the files on some computers, but some users can't open the files from their computer even though they can see it. We're all using PC's and they get the Error: Access Denied-Contact your administrator--or something similar. I've seen on the web similar issues and it may have something to do with ACL permissions. I don't know enough about Mac OS to understand this, but what is baffling is that they can be opened from some PC's but not others, and all of the Users have the same accessibility to the files. Thanks for a solution!!

Oh, on the losing Internet, try this...
Make a New Location, Using network locations in Mac OS X ...
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2712
10.7 & 10.8…
System Preferences>Network, top of window>Locations>Edit Locations, little plus icon, give it a name.
10.5.x/10.6.x/10.7.x instructions...
System Preferences>Network, click on the little gear at the bottom next to the + & - icons, (unlock lock first if locked), choose Set Service Order.
The interface that connects to the Internet should be dragged to the top of the list.
Instead of joining your Network from the list, click the WiFi icon at the top, and click join other network. Fill in everything as needed.
For 10.5/10.6, System Preferences>Network, unlock the lock if need be, highlight the Interface you use to connect to Internet, click on the advanced button, click on the DNS tab, click on the little plus icon, then add these numbers...
208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220
Click OK.
PS. Your English is quite good & completely understandable.

Is it possible to install Lion on the second hard disk on my Mini (2010) Snow Leopard Server, and switch between Lion and Snow Leopard? I like those voices Lion has in speech.

Is it possible to install Lion on the second hard disk on my Mini (2010) Snow Leopard Server, and switch between Lion and Snow Leopard? I like those voices Lion has in speech.

When baltwosaid NO emphatically, that was described as CORRECT ANSWER. Ditto in the caeses of the radically different answers from Camelotand Matt Clifton
Could it be that CORRECT ANSWER needs better defining by Apple?
That apart, yes, switching might involve rebooting. About the voices, well, I was the other day adding voice to a commentary in a video I was working on. There's only American English accent in SL — Lion I believe has British ones as well.
Why not, I wondered, try to install Lion purely for academic interest, maybe with an SD card (Sandisk Ultra II, 16GB) as Tom Nelson says is possible at http://macs.about.com/od/macoperatingsystems/ss/Perform-A-Clean-Install-Of-Os-X- Lion-On-Your-Mac.htm

Snow Leopard Server and FCServer

Hi.
I'm running FCServer on an iMac, and I'm currently looking for the best solution for giving co-workers outside of our office network remote access to our FCS database. The main purpose for this is for remote users to screen and download episode segments and movies from our database.
I was initially thinking VPN would be the only solution, but then I saw Snow Leopard Server has 'Mobile Access Server' built right into the OS, which appears designed to help users avoid having to use a VPN.
Before I go out and buy SLS for the company, I want to be sure it will work. Am I correct that Snow Leopard Server, and the built-in Mobile Access Server, will allow users outside of our network remote access to our FCSrvr database?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. And if this question is better suited for a different forum please let me know as well.
Thank you!

Hmmm... Thanks for the replies.
I posted this question in the OS X Server forum and got this response:
+"I haven't used Final Cut Server, but I'm pretty sure the Mobile Access Server wouldn't work with it. MAS works with plain HTTP, and the Address Book, iCal, and Mail (SMTP and IMAP) services; but FCServer is only partly HTTP-based, and I don't think even the HTTP part will work due to how MAS authenticates HTTP clients. Also, you might be thinking about using MAS as the same computer as FCServer, and it won't work that way -- MAS needs to be on a separate (internet-facing) computer from the actual origin server (which should be firewalled from the internet).+
+I'd go back to thinking about VPN... "+
Can anyone offer any more insight into this for me? I'm just an audio/video post-production guy, so this is all a little outside of my training.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Can I use Snow Leopard Server with Windows clients?

Mainly for e-mails and calendars. I have small office with 12 windows computers from XP to Win 7 and MS Office from 2003 to 2007. Will Snow Leopard Server work with that?

Can Mac OS X Server do this? Sure.
You're going to be learning a whole lot about running a server, regardless.
You really need to sort out what you have here and where you want to be, and how to upgrade or replace yor migrate your environment, and before you add the substantial increase in complexity of serving Windows from Mac. If you can't get off of Office circa 2003 or similarly old software, what are you going to do when you find, say, an incompatibility, or a need to migrate mail clients? Who are you going to call for help?
I'd guess that Small Business Server (SBS) is likely your best target here.
AFAIK, Exchange Server (which I'm guessing is what you're using) supports larger mailboxes in newer releases.
Look at the sustaining costs for what you're considering purchasing, too. How much it'll cost to configure, deploy and maintain the box and the network. Up-front costs are an obvious consideration, but maintaining many boxes and many versions itself introduces costs.
The arrival of Lion Server next month does not change my opinion. (And I'm not usually suggesting Windows and Windows Server boxes, either.) (And with the arrival of Lion and Lion Server, I'll follow my usual approach and not look to upgrade to the first release of that (or any other) new platform, if there are business-critical functions and services involved. You need time to debug and test the deployment.)

Big Project: Upgrade to Snow Leopard Server and new drive

Hi guys, with my early 09 Mac Pro (with maxed RAM) I need some advice. I am a guy who sticks with things for a long time, cautious about change, and likes consistency.
So, I have a copy of Snow Leopard SERVER I want to install from scratch. I also have 4 WD 1tb black caviar drives I want install -- replacing the current startup 640 gb drive. How would I best accomplish the backup of my current data on this smaller drive and then restore it onto the new 1tb drive?
I give you the following objectives I have for the use of these 1tb drives on the system and would appreciate any other advice you might have to offer.
1) I envision using two of the drives as primary, and the other two as backups using TimeMachine.
2) I would like to have the following partitions on the startup drive (#1).
a)one boot partition for installation of Server OS and Application programs.
b)one boot partition for future Mac OS installations.
c)one data partition to house the /Users filesystem - 4 named users in household who share two macbooks.
d)one or more partitions for separate deployments of Guest OSes for XP, Window 7, etc. using Parallels.
3) As far as partition sizes, I am thinking 50 Gb for each of the MacOS bootables and apps, 100 Gb for the Guest OSes. Leaving about 500 or 600 Gb for /Users, including an iTunes library, and the wife's scrapbooking.
4)Ok, drive #2. I want this drive dedicated to demanding storage needs of video.
5)Drive #3. TimeMachine Backup for Drive #1.
6)Drive #4. TimeMachine Backup for Drive #2.
Thoughts? I appreciate your questions and critique on my outline here.
Thanks much!

Off load /users to another hard drive
don't use internal drives for TimeMachine, especially both. Safer to be external. And if internal, use extra drive sleds.
Depending on what you use it for, the 640 might be fine. Maybe use it as a bootable clone though.

Leopard server and windows users

We run a mac + pc environment with some users on macs, many on pcs, and our office server is a windows exchange for email etc. As a multi-location consulting firm, we need to set up a good collaboration system that is hosted internally (to preserve confidentiality) and allows us to create a web-based knowledge creation, sharing and collaboration environment. We have looked at some of the new web services offers, but all are hosted by the providers.
We are considering buying a mac leopard server and have the following questions:
1/ will windows users be able to use the wiki, chat, calendaring and podcast facilities from their laptops without any problems, and will they have the same easy user interface?
2/ does the wiki server enable group collaboration like:
2a/ sending out email notifications on new posts (without changing our exchange server)
2b/ allowing groups to create project and team specific areas
3/ The problem we face is one of adoption. If we can make this as easy as facebook, then lots of people will migrate within 48 hours. But is this possible with the leopard server?
4/ finally, we are based in Singapore and our offices are all in Asia? Do we need a lot of experienced Apple-savvy technical people to create any of these applications, or is leopard server as easy to use as a mac is for a home user?
Any thoughts or inputs would help. FYI, alternatives we are evaluating are jive software's clearspace or basecamp or zoho's web based suites.
thanks / Suresh
Message was edited by: suresh Venugopalan Shankar
Message was edited by: suresh Venugopalan Shankar

suresh Venugopalan Shankar wrote:
1/ will windows users be able to use the wiki, chat, calendaring and podcast facilities from their laptops without any problems, and will they have the same easy user interface?
Yes, the web based interfaces work just fine for both OS's, the chat server is using jabber (clients on about every OS) and the calendaring is using the standards based iCalendar format.
2/ does the wiki server enable group collaboration like:
2a/ sending out email notifications on new posts (without changing our exchange server)
2b/ allowing groups to create project and team specific areas
I don't know of functionality to send out e-mail notifications on new posts, but you can subscribe to RSS feeds of things posted in the blog section of the wiki server. I'd need a little bit more information to understand what you're looking for as far as creating project and team specific areas.
3/ The problem we face is one of adoption. If we can make this as easy as facebook, then lots of people will migrate within 48 hours. But is this possible with the leopard server?
On the front end most of this stuff is very easy to use, and is in my opinion even simpler than facebook and such.
4/ finally, we are based in Singapore and our offices are all in Asia? Do we need a lot of experienced Apple-savvy technical people to create any of these applications, or is leopard server as easy to use as a mac is for a home user?
It's pretty easy to set the server up as long as you read the documentation. There's also a lot of resources online if you have problems (like this forum). It would probably be helpful to have someone familiar with LDAP systems and at least some command line usage on the server, but like I said, the documentation is pretty good. You can go read it to get an idea at http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/resources/
Hope that helps out some.

Snow Leopard Server and PPC clients

Just three short questions :
Has anyone managed to have Tiger PPC 10.4.11 accounts on Snow Leopard Server 10.6.4 ?
If yes, have this clients a network home directory on the Server ?
Have you encountered any trouble with these Tiger's clients ?
You don't have to post a long reply. Just answer yes or no and that way I would know if I've made a mistake or if there is a bug in Snow Leopard Server.
Thanks in advance for all your answers.

Hi
Ditto with Jeff
+"Has anyone managed to have Tiger PPC 10.4.11 accounts on Snow Leopard Server 10.6.4?"+
Yes. Lots of times. Also had 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 clients logging in with network accounts on a 10.4 Server.
+"If yes, have these clients a network home directory on the Server?"+
Yes.
+"Have you encountered any trouble with Tiger clients?"+
No.
Tony

Snow Leopard Server and ISP POP email

Hi there
Just wondering if the Mac Mini Server with Snow Leopard Server could manage the following:
Rather than set up my own domain for email, I am wondering if SLS can be set up to retrieve my POP email from my ISP mail server and then serve that mail using an IMAP mail box so that I can then access what were originally POp emails from anywhere.
Is this possible?

I'm facing this same problem... is there by any chance some sort of "guide" to using fetchmail and it's features? Or a GUI-interface for fetchmail?
I'll be the first to admit that I need training and such about working with OsX (server), and I'm working on that part

Snow Leopard Server and Spotlighting iDisk

I have set up a Snow Leopard server from scratch and have enabled iDisk with my MobileMe account. Spotlight says that indexing is enabled for the iDisk volume but it won't show any results. All other volumes are working correctly with Spotlight, and I have used mdutil and have added to the privacy list and removed again to reindex the volume. Has anyone else had issues with Spotlight and iDisk?

Okay, I have now managed to setup up the server. I did this by creating a Open Directory Master and then binding that to our Active Directory. I have setup Active Directory and LDAP binding on the client Macs.
I then added a user from AD into Workgroup Manager and applied a few preferences. They worked brilliantly. However, the computer Workgroup Manager preferences are not working at all! Is there a different way to add computers to Workgroup Manager (I added them by using the + sign and dragging them in from AD) and is there a way to automatically add a computer once it's joined to the domain, like it goes in to AD?

Leopard, Leopard server, and time machine.

Okay. First of all, I spent about 30 minutes searching through all the time machine questions here and found nothing like it so I'm sorry if its a duplicate question, but it does seem rather unique.
I have an XServe G5 running leopard server with an 8TB external firewire 800 RAID array that was purpose purchased to act as a time machine backup destination for about 8 machines.
XServe has that drive set up to be the backup destination, everything there is OK.
Here is what happens on the OSX Leopard machines when I go to backup:
1. I open Time Machine preferences.
2. I click on the "Choose Backup Disk..." button.
3. It thinks for about 10 seconds
4. It brings up a list of about 3 possible destinations. I select the one I want "Backups (XServe G5)"
5. I press the gleaming "Use For Backup" Button.
6. It asks for the users name and password. Type away.
7. It comes back to the 'Time Machine Preferences" window. The little on/off switch turned off, and we're back at the "Choose Backup Disk...." button.
This occurs on each machine I wish to backup, be they Mac Pros, or macbooks.
Help?

Ladies and gentlemen, I have the answer.
I stumbled across this accidentally when I was playing desperately in the Finder trying to get some inspiration about this issue.
The problem doesn't lie in the clients... it lies in the Server.
Here is my solution:
1. In the finder, right-click on the external drive, and select "Get Info".
2. Under "General", there should be 2 little check boxes, "Shared Folder" and "Locked".
3. Click on "Shared Folder" to put an X in it.
Thats it!
For some reason Time Machine setup didn't share the folder and so the client machines recognised it as a shared time machine backup source, but couldn't actually find it on the network because it wasn't shared.
Have fun ladies and gentlemen!!

External USB HD w/ Snow Leopard - boot from Windows machine

Is there a way for me to install Snow Leopard on an external USB or Firewire so that I can plug it in and boot it up from a PC?
Thanks,

Nope. And if you could, it would be a violation of the license to OSX.

Mini Mac Snow leopard Server and Timecapsule .....

Hi,
I'm thinking of buying a Mini Mac server for hosting several websites and was wondering if anyone can help me with the following:
1. How easy is it to host several website?
2. Can the Mac Mini Server be connected to a timecapsule for automated backups
3. (not really Mac related but you may be able to help!) My ISP upload speed is only .5 Mb, how does this affect download speeds from the sites I host?
4. Will it run joomla, and is php/mysql already installed?
Many thanks for your help in advance.
Regards
Andy

1. How easy is it to host several website?
Trivial.
2. Can the Mac Mini Server be connected to a timecapsule for automated backups
Time Machine is generally not recommended for servers, though you can use it as a target for your own backups. TM isn't good at making copies of active files, and servers are replete with active files.
3. (not really Mac related but you may be able to help!) My ISP upload speed is only .5 Mb, how does this affect download speeds from the sites I host?
You get 50 gigabytes of upload speed through sheer force of, um, whoops, sorry, clients receiving pages from or pulling files from your server get that 0.5 speed. Enabling compression can help. Some.
4. Will it run joomla, and is php/mysql already installed?
Yes, and yes.
Many thanks for your help in advance.
[Here are the server docs|apple.com/server/macosx/resources/documentation.html].
Set up DNS first.

Mac Mini /w Snow Leopard Server and Time Capsule: unavailable on www

Hello all,
Seeking some help with an issue that I cannot resolve and/or do not fully understand.
What I would like to achieve:
Make my newly purchased mac mini server available on the world wide web using my own web address, e.g. blabla.com.
Situation/Details:
I have installed and re-installed my mini server several times as I am doubt the correctness of the settings for the primary dns, currently set for 'blabla.com' and computer name 'miniserver'. The miniserver is connected with a network cable to my timecapsule and has been allocated the IP address 1.0.10.9 - time capsule has IP address '1.0.10.1'.
As the time capsule is connected to the internet - provided through Comcast - the following IP Address has been assigned '60.172.151.254' which seems to be my static external IP address. Furthermore I have a router address '60.172.148.1' for which I am unsure of its purpose.
Problem:
How do I 'link' my server to my www address so I can access deployed services over the internet? I have been reading about 'Port Forwarding', NAT etc but I am lost in what to do. Can someone help me out with this problem I am facing?
Thanks in advance for any comments/suggestions,
Tiest

Thanks DaddyPaycheck for your initial response. Before I jump onto the phone with Comcast couple of questions that I have for clarification purposes:
1) Are you implying that I must link my blabla.com address to that static IP address through my Domain Provider? See following example:
Record Type Record Host Record Answer TTL
A *.blablat.com >>Static IP<< 300
2) The current IP I have been given 60.172.151.254, why is that not static or how do you know it is not static?
3) When executing the command host in terminal for this IP address it returns the following: c-60-172-151-254.hsdl.co.comcast.net which coincidentally is the same as primary DNS it recommended during the initial configuration of the Mini Server. What does this mean? When I enter this in Safari it results in 'Safari can't connect to server'.
4) Executing the same command for my domain name 'blabla.com' it results in my 'internal' IP address '1.0.10.9'.
Thanks in advance for any clarification you can provide,
Tiest.

OS X Snow Leopard Server and Windows Machines

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