OS X Server

I've spent the past couple days at work setting up one of the two Apple XServs that we received last month.  So far, I'm liking the GUI admin tools included with Leopard Server, though I am also doing some tweaking via the command line accessed via ssh.  Also, to add some flexibility, I installed X11 and the XCode Developer Tools.  For one thing, I need gcc.

Specifically, I want to run Cacti on the box to provide SNMP monitoring of devices in our lab network, e.g., routers, switches, and CMTSes.  Cacti is basically a graphical front end to RRDTools, providing a web interface using PHP.  I installed MacPorts to simplify installing Cacti and its dependencies.  Unfortunately, the MacPorts install of net-snmp bombed so I wound up installing it by hand.  (This wasn't a big surprise.  I've had ports fail to install using MacPorts before on other boxes.)  With net-snmp installed I was able to get RRDTool installed, including the MySQL dependency.  Being an MySQL n00b, I'm working my way through getting that configured.

Aside from the Xserv providing network management and monitoring, I'm using it as a web server to provide a portal for our lab management group.  The initial version of the portal is based on a simple, static HTML page with links to forms and informtational documents.

However, OS X.5 Server includes a wiki server to build workgroup intranets.  I've managed to create a pretty decent looking wiki for our group.  I still need to figure out how to enable read-only access for people not in our group, so they can view our procedures and download forms.  The default workgroup wiki settings require users to authenticate before they can view the pages we create.

Future services on the box will also include file sharing, once I get an XRAID connected.