Extra Pepperoni

Page 155 of Server_Administration_v10.5.pdf says “Mac OS X Server v10.4 servers can be administered using v10.5 server administration tools.”

Alas, they cannot; this means there’s no way to manage a Leopard and a Tiger system from the same box without screen sharing — something I and every other Tiger admin would like to do for the upgrade process! More generally, people who have upgraded to Leopard must use screen sharing to manage our Tiger Servers. Let’s hope Apple fixes this quickly — rather than after most of us have slogged through our own upgrades.

So today they cut the wires to our main machine room’s A/C. This occurred as part of the general campus work, which is why we were expecting to be out of our old machine room by now. Alas, the new machine room is not quite ready yet, so our primary systems were in a very warm room. It was a bit uncomfortable working there, although not too bad.

So around 3:30, my bosses (2) came over to ask me what could be shut down; in a perfect world, this would be just stringing a bunch of hostnames together, between “dsh -w” and “shutdown -h now” (for Linux) and “shutdown -y -g0 -i5” (for Solaris), from my desk. Instead I tromped over and started reading labels on servers (many of which were out of date — now updated!), and deciding what we could do without, calling users to ask them which machines could be turned off for a while. We had my boss, boss^2, and boss^3, as well as a bunch of the Plant Ops guys and their boss.

After I’d shut down a dozen or so, they told us the A/C might be back within 15 minutes (hooray!). The first repair didn’t hold (fuse immediately blew), but within 25 minutes we had (partial but insufficient) A/C, and I turned most things back on.

For a while we opened the door to the FDR drive, which cooled the room a bit. I got a few pictures of the drive and of blinkenlights.

Setting up new Leopard (user) and Leopard Server systems, I was shocked to discover that, in System Preferences:Accounts:Guest, “Allow guests to connect to shared folders” is enabled by default. This is lousy security. Fortunately file sharing is off by default, but I turned file sharing on a day or two before I noticed guest access was enabled. I don’t want guest access enabled, and it shouldn’t be on without a conscious decision.