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In-Depth with Mac OS X Lion Server

 by Andrew Cunningham on August 2, 2011 8:00 AM EST
77 Comments | Add A Comment
77 Comments

A directory isn’t much good to anyone without any objects in it, so we’re going to create a few users and groups to test things out. As with creating a directory, there are a couple of different ways to do it.

In Server.app: Use the plus sign to add new users in the Users section - you can enter their full name, email address, and desired password here, which covers most of the account basics.

Directory accounts (as opposed to accounts local to your server) will appear with a circular blue globe icon next to their names.

Clicking the gear icon will allow you to edit the user’s properties (including the full name, email address, whether he or she can administer the server, and group membership - the user’s short name isn’t changeable after it’s set), as well as edit the services that user can use (making it easy to keep, say, mail or VPN access off-limits to guest users).

Editing a user

Controlling access to services

Under the Groups header, you can create and modify your groups and their memberships. If you’re running the Wiki or iChat services, you can make group-specific wikis and make group members appear automatically on each others’ buddy lists.

The second, more advanced way to edit users and groups is to use Workgroup Manager, another of the Server Admin Tools. Like Server Admin, this used to be the go-to tool for managing not just users and user groups, but also computers and computer groups - managing settings on a computer or computer group basis can be useful if you’ve got web kiosks or computer labs (for instance) that you want to act differently than standard workstations for users who log into them.

Start Workgroup Manager and authenticate using the Directory Administrator privileges you specified when you created your directory. The window you’ll see is a bit scarier than what you get in Server.app.

The four tabs above the left-hand column are for users, user groups, computers, and computer groups - if you made some users or user groups in Server.app before, they’ll show up here, too, and you can enter a lot more info in Workgroup Manager than in Server.app. There’s too much to go into in a general review, but this screenshot will give you an example of the detail you can go into:

The main thing you can do with Workgroup Manager that you can’t do with Server.app is manage OS X preferences - everything from the icons in the Dock to what applications your users are allowed to launch. If you select a user or group or other entry, you can click the Preferences button to see all of your options.

Settings in here are roughly analogous to those in System Preferences in any ol’ Mac.

Workgroup Manager is a powerful tool for managing users and settings, but like many of the other longtime OS X Server standbys, it’s on the road to being deprecated. The preferences managed in Workgroup Manager are mostly to be used for Macs running pre-Lion versions of OS X. Lion (and also iOS) clients are best managed with a tool new to Lion Server: Profile Manager.
Open Directory: Overview and Setup Profile Manager: Managing Lion and iOS
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  • ex2bot - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link

    Upgrading OS X is not much of a pain, as Repo says. Plus, it's practical to skip at least every other upgrade. So, upgrading every four years (2 + 2) at $60 isn't a big deal and the improvements are worth it.

    I especially appreciate Expose', Time Machine, Spotlight, and Quick Look and use them regularly And every Mac user has benefitted from Quartz GL (uses 3d graphics card to speed up screen draws).. There have been myriad "invisible" or subtle improvements as well. See Apple's "Mac OS X" section for details.

    Four years between OS upgrades is not bad, as I said. Longhorn was supposed to come out about 4 or 5 years after XP. Microsoft just had eyes bigger than its stomach and it was delayed. But Windows 7 was worth the wait. Especially features like the display compositor + aesthetically pleasing UI + improved security (and no more yellow speech bubbles popping up all the time)

    Ex2bot
    Automated System Process

  • ex2bot - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link

    BTW, Expose's successor is called "Mission Control."

  • Sahrin - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link

    a reduction in advertising, if you guys are going to do all these paid reviews for Apple.

  • Johnmcl7 - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link

    It's getting a bit of a joke these days that anything with the Apple badge will get a news article, preview, in depth review the moment it's out dwarfing everything else which barely seems to get a look-in. I get that Anand likes Apple stuff and if I don't I should go elsewhere but I like the non-Apple reviews when they do occasionally get published.

    John

  • ex2bot - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link

    It's no joke. Check Anand's mailbox some time*.

    Ex2bot

    *Crazies, please don't mess with his mailbox.

  • ex2bot - Friday, August 5, 2011 - link

    I know for a fact that Apple employees stuff money into Anand's mailbox*. Lots and lots of money. They use $20s and $50s straight from Jobs' car, who burns them to light his cigs.

    Ex2bot
    Currency Calculating Mac Fanbot

    * Anand, I don't really believe this. I was kidding, as I'm sure you've figured out. Actually, I'm sure they are $100s, not $20s and $50s. After all, he's a Billionaire.

  • the_engineer - Tuesday, August 2, 2011 - link

    Thanks for this great in-depth look at Lion Servers new & continued functionality, I learned a lot reading this. However, I'm still very confused at where XSAN fits into the picture. As a storage power-user I've used software Linux raid, semi-hardware windows raid (Intel, Highpoint), and I've lately dabbled into ZFS because it seems like it's really got everything I could ever want as far as straight storage capabilities are concerned (I'm running a raidz6 with 6 750GB drives currently running on Nexenta). I'd really like to put Lion Server on a mac and install a generic SATA card and add 6 3TB hard drives and do a great big raid5 in a mac pro, but am very confused as to whether or not this will work. I was very hopeful that Lion Server would integrate 'software' RAID5 or similar functionality, but it's not clear anywhere whether it does this or not. Simply put, Do I still need to buy a dedicated raid5 card to have a redundant array of inexpensive disks on a mac or am I missing something still?

    -Looking for a great user experience AND a ton of redundant storage

  • HMTK - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - link

    Why not set up a NAS with iSCSI or NFS ?

  • the_engineer - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - link

    LONG story short, geting a deidciated NAS box means spending more money than ought to be necessary at this point (I have an i7 desktop and a core2 desktop, both capable of running Lion, Windows, FreeBSD, you name it... Just fine, as well as plenty of vanilla SATA ports & cards available). I'm Trying to weigh all purely software options available to me, with ZFS/BSD sitting on top of the heap for storage features but OSX sitting on top of the heap from a usability standpoint. The longer I look at it the more likely I am to end up running one huge 20-drive ZFS based NAS under FreeBSD but was trying to avoid getting to this point.

  • HMTK - Wednesday, August 3, 2011 - link

    If you put it on the network you can access it with all decent OS's. I've got a little HP mini proliant just for that.
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