Day 1 of the Mac OS X Server Admin and Integration was pretty stacked. As far as difficulty, this is probably at the top of the heap for apple’s (non-dev) courses; but then again it is targeted at experienced system admins.
Each of us has a g4 tower running os x server and an ibook running client. All of the exercises are being done assuming there is no physical access to the server (well, the install cd has to be in the drive, and it does have to be powered on…). We started from scratch… booting the server from the cd, partitioning the drive, installing the OS, then using the cli tools networksetup and systemsetup to get ’em up and running – all done remotely (except for physically powering on the server). This is possible because sshd is on the server install CD (root pass = 1st 8 chars of serialnumber or 12345678 if it’s an older machine, ip is self-assigned, and can be discovered by querying a multicast responder which displays the IP along with the MAC addy).
We went on to do basic SNMP config, configuring a second NIC, configuring two different DNS servers (one for the external interface that responds only to queries for zones for which it is authoritative and has recursion disabled, one internal that responds only to local clients, and which allows recursion), and also got VPN / pptp up and running.
Considering the course is still in alpha, it’s pretty damn nice. There are some holes and placeholders, but what is there is fairly solid. In any event, it’s right up my alley, and I’m totally enjoying working through it, helping to get the minor kinks out, and providing occasional suggestions for improvement.
Didn’t get much sleep last night, so I definitely will tonight :)
