NausicaMedia, the french ACSA company, has translated the latest "Tips and Tricks for Macintosh Management for Leopard" in french.

For all the french speaking sysadmins around the world, you will be able to read the John de Troye's guide for managing your users accounts in your own language.

"Trucs et astuces pour la Gestion du Macintosh pour Leopard" is available at NausicaMedia's website.

Not sure how long this has been up, but may be of interest:

Web Help Desk which is generally well regarded as a help desk package has a free version, meaning free to use with no ads or time limits.

Get it here. 

Continuing on the iSCSI theme... a collision of worlds that will probably become more common in the future.

One part ZFS, one part iSCSI, one part TimeMachine... pour over ice and garnish with a galactic background.

http://opensolaris.org/os/project/qosug/how-tos/zfs_iscsi_integration/

I've been doing some pretty intensive research down here with iSCSI setups of various kinds. This market segment was a little rough a year ago...but it's much better now. Though there are still no "official" OS X Server setups that support it....certainly not Xsan (too bad!)

read on for a few more iSCSI notes...

Since we haven't seen much about this elsewhere...

Novell have now released Open Enterprise Server 2 SP1 which includes new Novell-engineered protocol support for Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) on the Linux platform.

See http://www.novell.com/products/openenterpriseserver/ for more information.

Boy howdy can 802.1X be a pain in the behind...

To help with this Jeff Dyck has created an application to help. We've had it up in the downloads section for a little while now, but it hasn't gotten the love it needs. So, if you're in an 802.1X environment it would probably be useful to take a look at this.

First read the docs.

Then download the app.

From Jeff:

I've just put up a SVN site for this on the Google Code site - I have it working and doing the essentials in my environment, but there's lots of room for improvement and to make it more flexible.  Would love to see other people contribute to it as well.

The Google code site is: http://code.google.com/p/leopard-8021xconfig/

As far as not modifying com.apple.airport.preferences.plist and adding to the keychain, that's very very very strange as it's working here...  Maybe make sure you have the newest version from the SVN as I did modify it to deal with the newer GUID based ByHost Preferences.  I also pulled some proprietary code we have that pulls user info from a database to make it easier to setup - I may have unintentionally removed something else, although I did test this version...

The Enterprise Desktop Alliance is doing a Mac/Windows integration survey. Maybe do it for the $50 gift certifiate. Or better yet, do it because they say they'll release the results and we're all curious.

After 6 years of development, Mike Bombich is retiring NetRestore, one of the most used and useful tools for OS X mass deployment. Mike cites an aging code base and other tools in the market as reasons for his descision. Read all the details here

I have to set up the IT infrastructure for a company that has 4 different offices.  Two of the sites have Apple based clients and the other two have windows based clients.  All of the servers are Xserves.  I hope to set up a single Open Directory structure that can handle Mail, a Corporate Intranet Site, a Corporate Website, Home Folders (for both the OSX and Windows laptops/desktops), Job Folders, and Backup for all of these.  There will be roughly 75 users at the HQ, and less than 20 users at each of the 3 satellite offices.

Our current equipment includes 2 or more Xserves at every location (plus Xserve RAIDs at the main office), 55 iMacs / Mac Pros, 13 MacBook Pros / Airs, 30 Windows Desktops, and 7 Windows Laptops.  Our network infrastructure is gigabit at all of the locations.

Currently each office has it’s own Open Directory master and separate fileservers for Job Folders and Home Folders.  The Corporate office hosts the mail, websites, and backup for all offices.

Any help or advice for creating this infrastructure in a secure and reliable way would be greatly appreciated!