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Backup and Restore Lion Wiki

Posted: November 7th, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Blog, Collaboration, Mac OS X Server, Migrate | Tags: | No Comments »

Backup the Collaboration Database

on the server running the wiki open a terminal and paste the following into the file backup-wiki.sh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


#!/bin/bash
PGUSER=_postgres

BACKUPFILE=`date +%Y%m%d`-wikibackup.tar.gz
/usr/bin/pg_dump -U $PGUSER collab -c -f /Library/Server/PostgreSQL/Backup/collab.sql
tar -cvzf /Users/admin/Backups/$BACKUPFILE /Library/Server

Save and exit the file, then do the following


chmod +x wiki-backup.sh
sudo ./wiki-backup.sh

This will create the file wiki-backup.tar.gz in the /Users/admin/Backups folder

Prep the migration file

Copy this file to the new server, untar it.

Then follow this procedure.

1. Open server.app and turn on wiki
2. Open terminal and find pgsql process (ps aux | grep pgsql) , copy it to clipboard
3. Stop wiki server
4. open terminal and enter  psql -U _postgres -d collab -f /Library/Server/PostgreSQL/Backup/collab.sql

5. a bunch of shit will fly by, forget about it.

6. copy the Wiki folder from our backup into /Library/Server

7. Repair permissions
8. Turn on wiki, pray


Apple Magic Triangle Deployment Results

Posted: October 15th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Active Directory, DNS, Kerberos, LDAP, Mac OS X Server, Migrate, Snow Leopard | Tags: , , , , , , , | No Comments »

This is a follow up to my last blog entry: Magic Triangle Setup with Windows File Server backed Portable Home Directories. Myself and a team of amazing people deployed the Magic Triangle solution in an architectural firm that recently was involved in a merger and needed to be brought into one unified “domain.” I place that word in quotations after some disagreements and long discussions with AD administrators as to the default definition of the word. Before we begin let’s just go over our Magic Triangle deployment and the roles of our servers.

  • vandc01.tld.ca is the local AD domain controller.
  • vanfile.tld.ca is the Windows based file server for all network home directories
  • od01.tld.ca is the Open Directory server which was also bound to AD
  • od02.tld.ca is the OD replica and netboot server for Deploy Studio
  • For all intensive purposes, the migration went fairly smoothly. The client was quite happy with the result, although the users of the network do not have as fast of a desktop environment as they did with a pure Macintosh network. The final outcome was Mac clients bound to both AD and OD. AD handled all the user and group authentication and authorization while OD took care of computer and group client management through MCX. I put a standard computer heirarchy in place on the OD side for computer group so different settings could be applied to different sets of computers. Such as, making all laptops automatically create portable home directories and install the HomeSync menu in the top menu bar. However, there was one very strange problem I encountered while binding the Macintosh clients to the Open Directory server.

    Normally, when you set “Require authenticated binding between directory and clients” to on in Server Admin the Mac client will prompt you for directory administrator credentials when binding a client. However, this was not happening for us. We were using 10.6.4 server and client everywhere, yet the clients were just not asking for authentication. Thus, a computer record was not being generated on the server side. What I did for the first few test cases was create computer records manually inside of Workgroup Manager, but this was not fun and tedious.

    Update: One of my readers, JJ, pointed out a great kb article from Apple on how to require directory authentication while binding. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4068 End of Update

    I whipped up a quick AppleScript to bind the clients for me, this script had the diradmin login and pass embedded in it which I know is not best practice yet it was a temporary fix. The reason for using the script is so that the command line utility dsconfigldap is passed the ‘-f’ flag which forces the client to authenticate to the directory server.

    The script is as follows:


    tell application "Terminal"
    do shell script "dsconfigldap -u diradmin -p 'diradminpass' -f -a od01.tld.ca -c `hostname` -n od01.tld.ca -l localsudouser -q localsudopass -v > /Users/Shared/odbind.log" with administrator privileges
    do shell script "echo 'Writing Search policy to plists' >> /Users/Shared/odbind.log" with administrator privileges
    do shell script "defaults write /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService/SearchNodeConfig 'Search Node Custom Path Array' -array '/LDAPv3/od01.tld.ca'" with administrator privileges
    do shell script "defaults write /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService/SearchNodeConfig 'Search Policy' -int 3" with administrator privileges
    do shell script "defaults write /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService/ContactsNodeConfig 'Search Node Custom Path Array' -array '/LDAPv3/od01.tld.ca'" with administrator privileges
    do shell script "defaults write /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService/ContactsNodeConfig 'Search Policy' -int 3" with administrator privileges
    do shell script "echo 'Successfully added the Open Directory server to your search path' >> /Users/Shared/odbind.log" with administrator privileges
    do shell script "echo 'Writing LDAP in your search paths' >> /Users/Shared/odbind.log" with administrator privileges
    do shell script "dscl /Search -append / CSPSearchPath /LDAPv3/od01.tld.ca" with administrator privileges
    do shell script "dscl /Search/Contacts -append / CSPSearchPath /LDAPv3/od01.tld.ca" with administrator privileges
    end tell
    tell application "Finder"
    activate
    display dialog "Computer is now bound to Open Directory as " & (do shell script "hostname")
    end tell

    File Migration from Apple Filer to Windows Filer

    This was one of the more challenging issues at hand. We had a whole bunch of OD user’s home folders on two Apple XRAIDs served out via AFP and needed to move the data to the Windows Filer using SMB. What we ended up doing is creating an LACP link to a MacPro and using the following script to migrate the users one by one.

    syncit.sh is a shell script that mounts two network homes for one user, one from AD and one from OD. It then transfers all data from OD to AD via rsync. To make this script work it depends on a couple things.

  • The users to be migrated are entered into a file called ‘users’ with NO extension in the following format
    1. oduser:aduser
      oduser:aduser
      oduser:aduser
      oduser:aduser
      oduser:aduser
  • When the script executes it will create the folder /Users/Shared/syncit_logs and two log files for each user. username.log username.err. The .log is all the stdout of rsync while .err is all the errors.
  • And finally when you download the script you’ll need to edit the variables at the top of the script with the FQDN’s for you file servers and shares.

    You can get the script here.

    Caveats

    Home Directory Ghost Mount
    One issue that we’ve seen appear more than once is home directory ghost mounting. When a user logs out of their profile sometimes their home directory does not unmount cleanly. As a result when the user tries to log in again on the same workstation they are unable to due to the computer believing the home directory is already mounted. This may also affect logins of the same user account to other workstations due to the home directory filer not timing out the mount session.

    Slow Network File System Access
    There have been at times severe client stalls due to slow file system access. This was noticed on literally zero network traffic congestion. This is a noted issue from many different implementations of using SMB shares for Mac home directories. Read http://www.macwindows.com/snowleopard-filesharing.html#091709k for more information. One suggested solution is to turn on Internet Sharing on the Mac client, however this is not a wise idea.

    Portable Home Directory Will Not Sync
    Sometimes homesync will become cranky. Definitely cranky. The easier and fastest way to resolve a home directory that does not sync is to perform the following.

  • Erase the contents of the users’s ~/.FileSync and ~/Library/FileSync directories.
  • Manually mount the user’s network home directory and erase the same directories on the server
  • Try the sync process again. Note: It will take longer to catalog the file system.
  • For most HomeSync problems it usually has something to do with file conflict resolution. To find out always open Console.app and look at FileSyncAgent.log. Try to perform a FileSync and watch the output of the log. If you are having problems with an initial sync try erasing the login.keychain file found in ~/Library/KeyChains on both server and client. Many times this will cause problems due to The Chicken and The Egg issues.

    Illegal Characters in File Names
    “ ‘/ \ + * ( ) [ ] are all illegal characters for file names on the Windows File Servers, as are directories or files that end in a space. As a result you may have issues creating working with these files. The Windows file server use unicode to map these characters, however there are failures often. Resolution is done by manually replacing filenames. This is also a LARGE contributor to File Sync failing.

    Summary

    Like I mentioned at the beginning everything went quite smoothly. There were of course strange things that happened through out the deployment, and the short one week runway I had to prep for this was WAY too short but in the end we pulled it off. If any of you out there are planning on deployment or need questions answer feel free to contact me via the About Me button at the top of blog!

    Update: Please check out my next post regarding HomeSync errors on an SMB server.

    Update 2: One of my readers, JJ, pointed out a great kb article from Apple on how to require directory authentication while binding. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4068


    Free Geek Server Room Build Part 4 AKA How I learned to love LTSP, Migrate OpenLDAP and get bind running all in one day!!

    Posted: May 8th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: DNS, Free Geek, Insight, LDAP, Linux, Migrate, SSH, Vancouver | 2 Comments »

    Free Geek Mascot #1

    Today was awesome! We got so much done!!! And it all went without a problem… oh except for when we tried to create an LACP bond on our NFS server and crashed the whole network… yeah… Quick story on that. we have 10 VLANs all trunking between our switches and our router. The NFS server is on VLAN 5 untagged on port 17 on the switch, we the added port 18 and created a bond on the switch. We then created a bond0 interface on the NFS server and used ifenslave to assign the eth devices to the bond device. Then….

    BAM! WHOLE NETWORK GOES DOWN. Not just vlan5, no no, the whole god damn network. No Internet access nothing, not even from the router, the router can’t ping a thing on the whole network.

    Why God? Why?

    Then the Network God ARP said, “Jordan did you check those top kwality DLink switches?” So off I went to check the switch I just modified. For some unknown reason the DLINK decided to plunk VLAN 6 tagged onto port 16 for no reason what-so-ever. So I fixed that, but no, nothing worked still. So Tyler says, just unplugg the ethernet cables to the NFS server. Voila! Problem solved. Basically we think the NFS was just spewing out crap across the network and making all the servers in VLAN 5 bail, including the router. We were getting some pretty crazy ARP poisoning happening the router. Now, on to the good stuff.


    This is a basic (and poorly made) diagram of how the Free Geek Vancouver network looks. We’ll take a look at how an LTSP client boots and logs in.

    First the LTSP client boots looking for a PXE server, DHCP is handed out and tells the client to grab a boot image from yew. The LTSP client then boots into Ubuntu 10.04 (bleeding edge baby) where the login screen is presented. The user logs in and authenticates against our new fancy LDAP server on teak. When the client logs in their home directory is handed out via LDAP as /net/home/<$user> This directory is handled by AutoFS and mounts the NFS home from maple. The user now has full desktop experience with all their account info and home directory handled by 3rd parties.

    What? Centralized authentication AND home directories?! REALLY?

    Our LTSP server is now a 2 x Dual Core Xeon 3.20GHz with 4GB of RAM. A HUGE upgrade from what we running before. In addition to all this insanity Vicki was able to migrate our ticketing system for us as well as update all the LDAP records for home directories, install autofs on all servers, install the mount maps, comment out all the irrelevant fstab crap AND switch over all our servers to the LDAP server. Pow vicki, pow!

    The backup system is pretty sweet as well. In our NFS server that holds the home directories is two RAID 5’s, a RAID 1 and some spares. One RAID 5 has a slice out of it that is for home directories. The other is 1TB for nothing but backups. What Tyler did was write a script that uses rsync to create incremental backups all done thru hard links. It’s pretty rad.

    Now that I come to think of it, I didn’t really do much except play with the dogs!!

    She helped in her own way


    What's going on?

















    How-To Migrate DNS Server from 10.5 to 10.6

    Posted: October 28th, 2009 | Author: | Filed under: DNS, Mac OS X Server, Migrate, Snow Leopard | 1 Comment »
  • Stop DNS service on your Snow Leopard server.
  • Backup your DNS config files on SL server
    mkdir /var/backups/dns; cp -r /etc/dns /var/named /etc/named.conf /var/backupsdns

  • copy the following files and folders from Leopard server into the same locations on Snow Leopard Server
    • /etc/dns
    • /etc/named.conf
    • /var/named
  • start DNS via the command line on SL server serveradmin start dns
  • Launch Server Admin and verify all zones are present
  • Test extensively