| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Fri 13 Apr 2007 Leopard delayed. And I get a new lease of life.Category : Commentary/leopardDelayed.txt I was beginning to understand that I wasn't going to be able to get new versions of MailServe, DNS Enabler and WebMon out in time if Leopard were to be released in May or June. Quite a few things still don't work, like SMTP authentication using SASLDB and CRAM-MD5, e.g., which I've been struggling with over the last three weeks. The trouble is, it's hard to find any information over the web, due to the non-disclosure agreement. So we have to be circumscribed about it. Let's just say, imagine NetInfo is gone, and so is lookupd. What do we have to do, to do things in an equivalent way? That's the kind of things that need to be solved, before we can even think about putting in new features or taking advantage of the new interface elements in Leopard. So, Leopard being delayed to October is great, at least for me. No excuses, though, if I don't then do a better job by October. SMTP authentication using SASL is something that had broken each time we moved from Jaguar to Panther to Tiger, and now to Leopard. Each time I had found a solution, but not, as it seems, this time. I've been tempted to drop support for it. But I'll keep on trying. Maybe it's just a bug that'll be fixed in a subsequent release. Hopefully. Because I've run out of ideas. On a happier note, I've got an LDAP (Light-weight Directory Access Protocol) Server running, at last, with help from Scott Riggins, who sent over some instructions, and I've got it running also on Leopard, no less. LDAP will link Address Book and email, and provide a single sign-on to authenticate users with mail, web and database servers. Imagine you get a new staff. You enter his data into the HR system, some of which goes into the LDAP system. He's then able to use his single password to logon on to the email and database systems, and his contact information appears automatically in everyone's address book. Same goes for a debtor or creditor record, originating in accounting. Centralised control or storage of information, but automatic propagation to wherever it might be useful. I can imagine how that can be made to help small companies, as well as the big ones. It used to be that this kind of power is only available to the companies with the big IT staff. The ones with the big iron. But now it's possible to make this available in a one-click installer/configurator that'll run on any stock, consumer OS X machine, available to all. That's power. The power to subvert the established order. The power, as Apple used to say, to be your best. |
Mac@Work
Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:
all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks. |
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