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Written by Lance Ogletree
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Thursday, 24 February 2005 |
 I haven't found many sites that make mention of Apple's Server Assistant application. For the amount of tedious work it can save the average administrator, I felt it was worth mentioning and help draw attention to it for others.
Located with the rest of Apple's server admin applications (/Application/Server) this little app can help save time by allowing an administrator to remotely install and configure servers on the their network.This functionality can also be achieved at the command line. You can read about it in the Panther Setup guide posted in the Servers In Depth section.
Beginning on page 79 of the "Getting Started.pdf" of Apple's server documentation it explains in detail how to use this time saving application.
The one feature of the application that really makes it shine is the ability to create a configuration file with all the standard setup information for the server. This file can then be saved into a folder called "Auto Server Setup" and placed on a dvd,cd, thumbdrive, etc. After you have installed the server components, the server will then look for any mounted volumes with this folder and read the configuration file for its setup information.
The configuration file can be saved as a generic file which all servers can use, or you can specifiy, based on criteria such as IP address, MAC address, etc as to which configuration file the server will use.
Next time you have several servers to setup, either locally or remotely, take a look at the Server Assitant application and see if it can help you shave a few minutes off your installation and setup of Apple Mac OS X Server. |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 24 February 2005 )
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