What This Document Is About
This page is intended to be a starting-point for users wishing
to find out more about managing and configuring a self-managed Mac
(running MacOS X). It contains pointers to other information sources
(both local and elsewhere) which should help you to gain familiarity
with MacOS X, its strengths, and its idiosyncracies.
Resources Available
There is an Informatics
MacOS Hints
& Tips page (including
maintenance and
purchasing deals), plus various other pages:
- There are various
MacOS docs on the wiki, including information on
Certificates, CVS and Subversion, File Transfer, SSH, and
Authenticated SMTP.
- A "Setting up AFS on your Mac" document is in preparation. In
the meantime, see the Mac AFS setup notes on the DICE
Wiki.
- For details on generic Kerberos setup (required for AFS) you
might want to take a look at the MIT
Kerberos Preferences on Mac OS X page (note that this
does not deal with DICE setup). It may be useful if you are
using a Mac outwith Informatics.
- The "Getting
a Mac to use the DICE Infrastructure" document may be of
help to advanced users.
- A section of the above page offers a reliable method for
adding
Samba printers to MacOS 10.3-10.5
- The "Obtaining
and Running Mac LCFG" document may also be of help to
advanced users.
- Mike Fourman's Mac
Tips page.
- There is a kx509 client for the Mac, which should
probably be made available more widely. There are still
occasional random connection problems with Safari (to the
Wiki for example) though.
- The tunnelblick GUI
for openvpn lets you do
useful things, such as print when you are on the wireless.
- There is a script for adding Informatics printers.
This seems to work fine.
- iChat may need some firewall holes to communicate
reliably with the outside world. There is a resource set to
add to the LCFG. It appears to OK for jabber.
- Bibdesk is a
really good (and free) bibtex client for the Mac.
- There is an Oracle calendar client - this is
supposed to be the forthcoming EUCS standard for shared
calendars.
- Various Office solutions exist for the Mac. Try
NeoOffice (a free
OpenOffice lookalike). Also, if X11 is installed, OpenOffice
is in there somewhere, but "doesn't really share a common UI
with the rest of the Mac". MS Office is also available (for
free as part of the Select Scheme - but Informatics doesn't
subscribe to this!). For PowerPoint compatibility only, try Apple's
Keynote
(from the iWork suite).
Users may also wish to install Fink or DarwinPorts, to allow
semi-automatic installation of Open Source applications - the Fink Project brings Unix Open
Source software to Darwin and MacOS X, making it available for
download as a coherent distribution. Fink uses Debian tools like
dpkg and apt-get to provide binary package management.
The DarwinPorts
Project offers similar functionality.
Other Useful Notes
- There is currently no reliable and comprehensive backup
mechanism for the Mac, although there are partial
solutions:
- rsync, to synchronise files to another
local networked machine (see the - possibly helpful,
but as yet unevaluated - third-party web pages
Remote Administration/Backup of Mac OS X Using rsync
and
HOWTO: Backup Your Mac With rsync).
- .Mac, to store files on Apple's servers (see
www.mac.com):
"Keep multiple Macs in sync and access your
information from anywhere...
With .Mac syncing, all
your information stays current on every Mac you use.
And, because .Mac is web-based, you can get to your
stored information from any Mac or PC with an
Internet connection."
(Note that this is a chargeable service provided by
Apple, although there is a 60-day free trial period.)
- The Informatics jabber server doesn't work with iChat because
of the mandatory kerberos auth.
- There's information on a University deal on Apple
maintenance on the Hints
& Tips page.
