About Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server

kisTechnology professionals, particularly those earning stripes battling Windows tours of duty, aren’t fully aware of the strides made in Mac OS X Server. Snow Leopard extends functionality and performance even further. From a single Mac Mini powering the platform to an Xgrid Distributed Computing initiative, Snow Leopard packs serious potential. Here are 10 things enterprise administrators should know about Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server.
Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: Serious scalability

From a simple chassis, such as Apple’s $999 specially designed Mac Mini, to near state-of-the-art Xserve rack-mount servers, Snow Leopard Server is capable of scaling to most any organization’s needs. Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server can manage the load, whether it’s a small workgroup requiring shared calendaring, email, and file services or large enterprises requiring instant, simultaneous access to terabytes of data in multiple locations.

2: Simplified administration

Apple’s hallmark has long been approachability and the ease with which its systems can be deployed, maintained, and operated. The same is true with Mac Snow Leopard Server. Users and groups are easily managed, thanks to the clean but powerful Workgroup Manager interface. The Server Status Dashboard makes short work of monitoring the server’s health. System Image Utility simplifies the process of creating and deploying system images, while NetBoot permits enterprise Mac administrators to boot multiple systems using a disk-based image hosted on a single server. Snow Leopard also adds iPhone deployment and remote system restore (NetStore) tools, too.

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3: No CALs required

Mac server administrators lose the headache that is client access license management. Mac OS X Server licensing does not use client access licenses. Mac OS X Snow Leopard ships for $499, with unlimited clients. So does Apple’s enterprise Xserve servers. Organizations benefit in two ways: lower costs and time saved having to chase down, purchase, and record server, email ,and database CALs.

4: High availability design

Apple engineers have designed Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server for high availability. Organizations can leverage the platform’s automatic recovery, file system journaling, RAID, and clustering capabilities to ensure uptime (including clustering support for email services). Business continuity is further enhanced by Snow Leopard Server’s support for image capturing and deployment, rsync, ditto, tar and asr backups, and even basic Time Machine backup and recovery.

5: Directory services support

Directory services, which track information about users, groups, and their requisite permissions, have become critical infrastructure within organizations small and large alike. Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server includes a broad range of support for existing directory services and authentication technologies, including Open Directory (OpenLDAP, Kerberos, and SASL included), Windows NT Domain Services (using Samba 3), Backup Domain Controller (BDC), and RADIUS, among others.

6: Cross-platform compatible

Snow Leopard Server’s support for numerous directory services technologies enables integration with other network operating systems. Organizations still requiring legacy or Windows platforms to run specific components of their business need not start from scratch when deploying Mac OS X as their NOS or abandon past IT infrastructure or investments. With the server’s support for common standards and protocols (including but not limited to SMTP, POP, SSL, AFP, SMB, CIFS, IPP, DNS, DHCP, NAT, VPN, SSL, WebDAV, and MySQL), Apple’s server platform is compatible with Windows, Linux, and other platforms.

7: Collaboration-friendly

Email is already a critical tool today. Increasingly, organizations are embracing team sites, instant messaging, mobile communications, and shared calendaring functionality. Snow Leopard Server natively supports all these technologies out of the box, with no additional software packages or licensing required. iCal Server 2 powers shared calendaring and meeting and event coordination. Wiki Server 2 provides a customizable wiki-powered Web site for empowering team communication and collaboration. Mobile Access Server securely connects remote users to centralized corporate resources, while iChat Server supports instant messaging.

8: Clustering-capable

Organizations requiring leading edge distributed computing capability can power their networks using Snow Leopard Server. Apple’s Xgrid technology, included within Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, enables connecting a wide-ranging collection of Mac desktops, workstations, and servers into a supercomputer. Systems need not even be in the same location to join an Xgrid cluster. The Xgrid Admin interface provides administrators with a simplified console for configuring the resulting incredibly powerful clusters. In fact, one of the world’s largest Xgrids is working to cure cancer in TechRepublic’s home state of Kentucky.

9: Superior Web infrastructure

Whether an organization needs to build and maintain a team collaboration Web site (Wiki Server 2), host Web pages or Web applications (integrated Apache), or produce and distribute audio and video programming on the Web (Podcast Producer 2), Snow Leopard Server is a step ahead of competing network operating systems. While many network operating systems simply host content, Mac OS X Server includes features that aid production, workflow, and publication as one streamlined process.

10: Reasonable system requirements

Despite having supercomputer potential, Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server can be installed on a Mac desktop, if need be. Smaller organizations will find they can run the platform on a Mac with a single Intel processor, 10GB of free hard disk space, and just 2GB of RAM. While 8-core Xeon Xserv systems with 48GB of RAM and three 2TB drives are available off the shelf, the platform can be run confidently on a Mac Mini within some environments.

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5 Practical and Quick Image Adjustment Tricks Using OS X’s Preview

1. Image Correction

Preview offers a series of image correction techniques, including Auto Levels which is pretty useful when it comes to adjusting photographs. As my communications technology professor told me, levels consistently need to be adjusted to bring the natural colors back into the photograph. Usually, I’ve found Auto Levels to be more than suitable. As you can imagine, I’m no communications technology major.

Here’s a list of what other adjustments are available, a few of which will be brought up in this article later on.

2. Print as PDF (receipts)

If there have been times when you needed to keep a record of certain submissions or receipts, I’ve got a tool that’ll save you a lot of paper and potential clutter. I absolutely hate printing off records and receipts, as they seem wasteful and they always just end up lying around and getting recycled. Instead, now I take a screenshot from my email Inbox onto my hard drive and open it using Preview and make adjustments. Then I simply click the File > Print > and then click the PDF button.

Luckily for me, and slightly unrelated to Preview, Google Chrome also has a PDF button which I use to save pages as PDFs.

I keep these PDFs on my hard drive, and only summon them as needed. Every month or so, I delete the unnecessary ones. Less paper wasted, and less clutter!

Alternatively, you could use these online tools to convert pages into PDFs.

3. Annotation

Preview is also very useful when you need to highlight certain portions of image. It has an Annotate tool, which allows you to create rectangles or circles in vibrant colors that help to point out the parts of the image you want to.

When the Annotate button is selected, this toolbar appears on the bottom of the Preview window.

These options are to create an Arrow, Circle, Rectangle, Text, adjust the color, adjust thickness, and font. Pretty useful for a quick touch-up.

4. Compression

I have personally found Preview to be a lifesaver with compression. I’m not entirely sure why, but Photoshop doesn’t give me an accurate output size when it comes to compressing images, and sometimes output could be a grainy-looking image. I’ve never had this problem with Preview, and use it for all my compression tasks.

Simply by adjusting the taskbar when saving in JPEG, I can control the size of my output file. This is definitely useful when it comes to uploading attachments onto emails or websites.

5. Batch Resize images

If you’ve ever needed to resize a bunch of images for printing purposes or hard drive storage, you’ll know the beef with batch resizing. I haven’t had an app that can do it as well as Preview on the Mac. Photoshop is way too overpowered and doesn’t have a batch resize option, but Preview does.

Simply open all the files you want to resize in Preview by selecting them all and right-clicking, selecting Open With, then Preview.

The images should appear in the bar on the right of the Preview window, as highlighted in the image above. Select all of them by pressing ⌘+A. Then go to Tools > Adjust Size.

You can now adjust the sizes, and have Preview calculate the height or width according to the scale of the original. This is pretty neat, and has served me well through my blogging career. You can similarly adjust the color or rotation of these images by selecting all the images in the bar on the right, then going into the Tools part of the menu and selecting the respective tool.

Preview has the potential to be the Swiss army knife of your image adjustment applications. Even better: it comes free with every Mac! Take advantage of the abilities of Preview and enjoy your newfound convenience

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How to Completely Uninstall Programs on Mac with AppCleaner

        We Mac users have all had files that left some unwanted 

traces behind it. How do we make sure that the entire 

application gets deleted, thus ensuring we’re not wasting any 

space or resources on something unused? Enter AppCleaner, 

a simple and efficient application that gets the job done.

     AppCleaner is an application that simply requires you 

drag and drop an unwanted application into its dialog box. A 

new box will pop up, displaying a list of files that are being 

removed. Simply click Delete, and the application will be 

removed from the computer.

             That’s basically its primary function. AppCleaner also 

encourages cleaning by displaying Applications, Widgets, 

and Others tabs. Simply select an application, click Search, 

then click Delete.

        Widgets are those little gadgets you see in the 

 Dashboard. A lot of them get old, real fast. If you’re tired of 

one, you can conserve space by deleting it through 

AppCleaner.

             The Others tab includes certain plugins, such as Flash 

 Player and Quicktime. These could be useful to remove 

when you’re running out of space and desperately need 

everyKB.

You can choose to protect certain apps through AppCleaner. 

This ensures you won’t delete essential applications or ones 

that are launched right now.

AppCleaner also has a feature called SmartDelete, which 

automatically detects when an application is trashed and will 

delete related files. This is a useful feature to turn on, as it 

makes deleting files a lot more comprehensive.

If you’re looking to do some spring-cleaning with your Mac, 

give AppCleaner a try.

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