Author: admin

Upgrading MySQL on a Mac

Now this isn’t going to be a normal post where I pretend that I know what I’m doing. However it was time to upgrade our installation of Web Help Desk and I figured I would also upgrade MySQL, because they finally fixed a bug where the the server would not launch on boot. This caused more than a few heart

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Can’t Send Email from Mac Mail?

We’ve previously gone over the steps needed to set up and configure an email account hosted by Servicemax here, but one thing that seems to happen a lot is people can’t send email after the setup. So we’re doing another guide to try to make this easier, and easier to troubleshoot. If you haven’t set up the email address already,

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Netgear and VPN Passthrough

I’ve just spent a couple of weeks fighting with a very frustrating problem- setting up VPN passthrough on a Netgear DGND3700v2. This is a reasonably high end device (for Netgear) and actually contains the ability to terminate VPN endpoints. However the built in VPN server does not support the built in VPN software in the Mac OS, and you have

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Malwarebytes Anti Malware

This product used to be known as Adware Medic but has recently been acquired by Malwarebytes. They now have a free home use version and several different paid products for business. I used the home version to test. I don’t currently use antivirus on my machine- Sophos was the last product used but it was removed when it went crazy

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LogMeIn Remote Uninstall

If you’ve been reading recent posts you would know that LogMeIn wanted to charge me a huge amount of money for my latest subscription. So I’ve been playing with ScreenConnect and really liking it. I’m not all that keen to run a machine to host this simple service, which an on-prem install currently requires but at some point in the

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Admin Tool Radius

This $2.50 (Aus) tool from the app store will help you to configure RADIUS (technically FreeRADIUS) that is included with Server.app for Yosemite. RADIUS, just like LDAP, is an open standard for authenticating users to a central database. You could potentially make your WiFi much more secure by implementing 802.11x which leverages RADIUS to auth back to your directory server.

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Chatting to your Hardware and Software

A lot of software and hardware now comes with the ability to send email alerts when things happen. Recently I’ve installed Filemaker Pro Server, Carbon Copy Cloner, a LaCie RAID and a WordPress Plugin that can all let me know when something has gone wrong, or perhaps right. Mac OS X Server also does this. You don’t really want to

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Silent installs Using Meraki

*Just making clear that this post refers to the ‘legacy’ version of Meraki Systems Manager. There are some features of the paid version which make it a lot easier to install stuff remotely…. I’ve always known that we could install software with Meraki Systems Manager, but the need to pin the method down became a bit more urgent last month

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Configuring RADIUS server on Yosemite

I’d like to start by recognising the article and video from Jedda Wignall for the initial article about Mac OS X Server v10.8, and the follow up article by Charles Edge at Krypted.com for Mavericks v10.9 However I think I found enough differences in Yosemite to make it worthy of another write up, so here goes- much of this is

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‘Clean’ Install on a Remote Machine

This holiday season, I was faced with an interesting problem. I had a machine in a different (physical) state that needed to be hooked up to the main server and act as an Open Directory replica. It had been upgraded and worked fine while it was in my office, but when in place it was behaving weirdly. At odd times

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