Well, I’ve been swamped with work for the last 10 months and haven’t even come close to having a chance to sit down and write any well thought out blog entries.  I was compelled though a couple weeks ago to write a new entry about the coolest new feature that I stumbled across in Apple’s still relatively new OS X 10.5.2 Server.

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Apple finally released their 10.4.9 update today after about 4 or 5 developer releases. I’m currently downloading these updates onto my local software update server to deploy to my Apple servers and workstations. I’ll be looking forward to testing the previous authentication problems that I have had in the past, but I can already see a number of other outstanding issues in the list below have finally been addressed by Apple.

This is Apple’s list of fixes for Server:

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There are many reasons for why a company would want to integrate an Apple Open Directory server with a Microsoft Active Directory server, but the most common scenario is that a company already has a Windows centric IT environment. In this post we will explore this scenario along with an Apple centric environment that is looking to have full featured Windows client support and greater stability.

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There are a lot of places to start when discussing IMAP email. I could start with its technical aspects, postives, negatives, supported platforms, etc. I think that it makes the most sense to start by discussing IMAP’s history.

IMAP was originally conceived at Stanford in 1986 by Mark Crispin who was later hired by the University of Washington in 1989. The first IMAP server was deployed at Stanford for testing in 1987, but it wasn’t until 1992 that the first IMAP server was truly implemented. In 1992 with the help of Mark Crispin and many others contributing to the UW-IMAP server application, the University of Washington rolled out one of the largest IMAP implementations to date using the IMAP2bis protocol, along with the Pine 2.0 front-end client application. It was during this same year, 1992, that Carnegie Mellon University began development of their own Cyrus IMAP project which is the mostly widely used IMAP service today. It was at the University of Washington in 1996 that together with vendors such as Sun and Netscape, the current IMAP4rev1 protocols specifications were completed.

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When Apple designed its directory service, simplicity was the likely the central focus. Open Directory is easy to configure and easy to administer, when it is working. Apple’s Open Directory quickly became the single most frustrating point of my research. Although Apple has created Open Directory from the solid foundation of Kerberos and OpenLDAP, they made a mistake at some point. I have been working on these issues for almost a year now, and I frequently ran into them while I was consulting for another Mac IT firm in Seattle. During this consulting stint that lasted for 6 months I completed over twenty OS X server installations had had direct access to resources at Apple to solve problems and report bugs. The issues that I ran into with Open Directory were ignored and denied by Apple. The stock answers that I continually received never addressed the problem.

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