When you install a Perfect Server based on Centos and ISPConfig v3.x, the system / 'installer' creates for the components self-signed certificates. All these certificates will generate different warnings in your browser, mail clients etc. So time to eliminate those warnings.
First I needed to find out where all those certificates are located, and what there formats are. In my case, there are three services that use SSL/TLS in some form;
- Postfix SMTP service
- Courier IMAP service
- http / Apache2 webservice
Checking the configuration files will reveal their locations.
The moment you download OS X Lion, you'd better have a copy of OS X Snow Leopard, because by default the new Apple OS can only be installed on a previous installed Operating System (upgrade). So if you need to reinstall your Mac in the future, you need to install OS X Snow Leopard first, and then upgrade to OS X Lion. Also, there's no way of ordering an OS X Lion copy on DVD..... Well, that sucks.
Fortunately, there's a way of creating the installation DVD by extracting the actual disk image from the downloaded OS X Lion installation package.
I'm currently busy with several 802.1x implementations in corporate networks, and in one of those environment I get the strangest behavior in regards to the authentication process.
In this particular case I use a Microsoft 2008 Active Directory. Mandatory for distributing the wired network adapter settings in regards to 802.1x. The clients are a mix of Windows XP (SP1 and SP3) clients and some newer and/or exotic operating systems. The authentication mechanism of choice is EAP-TLS with dynamic VLAN assignment. The RADIUS server used is the Cisco Secure ACS v5.x appliance.
During the authentication process of the XP SP3 PC's I saw that the first authentication attempt was made with the PEAP mechanism. Since PEAP isn't allowed, the authentication mechanism failed. About a minute and twenty seconds later the PC started another dot1x authentication sequence. This time using EAP-TLS, and the PC got access to the network.
It has finally been done. I've switched off the old Windows 2003 server at home and officially replaced it with an Apple Mac mini server. For now... And with 'for now' I really mean for now. It turns out that Apple OS X Server doesn't resemble its client counterpart at all. Where the client is stable and intuitive, the server edition lacks both.
I'll try to explain why I think there's lots of room for improvement. Mainly stuff I ran into while configuring the server/services.
Since the Windows fulfilled several functions, I needed these functions to be available on the OS X server as well. These were;
- Networking services like DNS and DHCP
- Webserver
- Mailserver
- MySQL Database
- SSH Server
- File sharing on the internal network
- Public Key Infrastructure for issuing certificates
- Download station
Evaluating these functions, one would think that this shouldn't be a problem. Well it actually is.... At least some of those features.
Oké. Day 2. After the successful installation and configuration of CentOS with Adobe Coldfusion, I needed to install MySQL as a database. So, I started the virtual machine, and found out why Linux will (probably) never cut it as a common desktop environment.
X11 - No DesktopYesterday I (properly) shutdown the system (which had the GNOME Desktop), and today it started with some back to the 60's desktop. Every icon gone. All that I'm left with was a terminal window, clock, and a FireFox window. This environment is the basic X11 desktop.
;)
