Continuing the Mac theme

 So today the launch date of July 11th was announced for the iPhone 2.0… And everything I have been hearing is it is fully compatible with Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007…. Sooooo, I am posting here what we communicated to all our users to make sure there is no confusion… the following was communicated to our users today:

Last fall we communicated what mobile devices would work in combination with our network to synchronize your calendar and email over the air.  A new device will soon be added to that list, the Apple iPhone 3G is being released on July 11^th.  The new version of the iPhone includes the ability to use Microsoft® Exchange ActiveSync®, and is compatible with our servers. 
As before this requires your cellular phone account to include data services and our support of mobile devices only extends to the configuration of your device connecting to our servers.  All other data issues must be resolved by you and your carrier. 
Since none of us in the Information Technology Office have an iPhone we will not be able to pre-test and configure this new device.  This means there may be some issues that we cannot be aware of and resolve prior to helping you configure an iPhone 3G to connect to our network. If you plan to purchase an iPhone 3G, I strongly encourage you to check with your reseller to confirm the return policy is at least 15-30 days to allow enough time for us to get the device configured and still  allow you to have enough time to try out the device and decide if it performs as you expect it would.

Windows AD and Mac OD Test

Our order of new Mac hardware arrived last week, so that meant we had enough gear to bring to live a small sandbox to test the roll out of what Mac calls the Magic Triangle.  This magical setup includes Windows’ Active Directory, Mac’s Open Directory and our Mac Client machines.

We started our OSX and Windows domain integration project in a test environment, with the expectations that we would mess something up and want to start over.  Since we are learning to be OD admins (and yes the concept is the same but the presentation and logic is very different from working with AD), we elected to do our first run in an environment that we can completely bomb and not cause harm to the core network.

The test network consisted of:

- A Sonicwall SOHO Router

- Dell 755 workstation running VMWare Server (Functioning as our PDC)

- A Power PC Mac Mini as our Open Directory Server

- A Intel Mac Mini as our Client Machine.

Jeremie performed a P2V of our Domain controller using Vmware’s converter and copied this to a new Dell 755 that had not yet been deployed.  Since our PDC (or in w2k3 terms DC1) is also our DHCP server and DNS server we quickly had a total replication of our production domain online in just under an hour and a half.

For the Mac side of this sandbox we have a PPC Mac Mini and two Intel Mac Minis.  The PPC will eventually become our production OD Server and the Intel minis will go into production as client machines.

We used a hybrid of two guides to perform the installation:

http://www.bombich.com/mactips/activedir.html (Courtesy of Hezekiah Barns)
http://www.afp548.com/filemgmt/visit.php?lid=69 (Courtesy of Chris Green)

Both documents required some customization since they are assuming you are working in a new environment, but this was easy to understand.  The process in the documentation is fairly straight forward.

Both Documents recommend creating a Binder Account for AD, we elected not to delegate this from an Administrator login and it worked fine.  From everything we can gather the account used to Bind to AD is simply used for just Binding and isn’t used any in the future.  If this isn’t the case, please correct me.

A few things we learned in the binding process, Bind to AD first then to OD.  This lists the Directories in the appropriate Search Policy Directory Services.  You can bind to OD first, but you will just have to change the order later.

After installing OSX Server we had issues with the accessing Server via the Server Admin console since it was not appearing in our Windows DNS.  This can be resolved by going to Preferences>Sharing>Edit> and Checking the Global DNS box and entering the domain.org as the host.  In our case no user credentials were required. Correction 6/10/2008: In our case credentials were required to authenticate to the DNS server.  We used an account we have configured for continued upkeep of the network.

Do you Use PCO Follow-UP

After my recent post do you use PCO and ACS? Michael Foster asked

Michael Foster

05.29.2008 9:29 am

We use PCO which I just found out about last week. Where is the documentation for the API? I’d like to see about getting it integrated with Fellowship One. I browsed around the forum and it looks like there are some other people inquiring on this feature.

To get information from PCO about the API you are suppose to email support@ministrycentered.com 

We are releasing the first part of our API for developers of other programs to begin to integrate with PCO. If you are interested in this functionality please e-mail:
support@ministrycentered.com

Here is the info I received, the included link has a good amount of documentation for the API.

Hello,

Thanks for your interest in the API! We have been working hard on getting our API ready and we are excited to see what you are going to do with it.

Right now the API is considered to be in beta and we are working on rolling out the API for each section of Planning Center separately. The first part of the API that is available immediately is the People API, then in the next couple of weeks we will be releasing the Songs API. Once we are sure those are meeting the needs of our customers we will be releasing a Plans API.

You can get access to the API documentation at:

http://www.planningcenteronline.com/home/api

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact us.

Thanks!

Jeff Berg
Owner/Developer
Ministry Centered Technologies

New Category & New Project

I am breaking the recent silence with this announcement…

I am officially adding a new category to the blog, OSX Domain Integration.  Ok, now that you have fallen out of your chair in shock please pick up your jaw and continue reading.

Over the past few months I have been reading and learning about how to better serve those in our user community who don’t just prefer the Fruity OS, but are required to use OSX machines because of their role.  Over the past two years we have continued to say we need to learn to serve and support this segment of our users better.  Well we have finally had/made the time to put those dreams into play.

Well, that’s the why on the new category.  This project has been extremely time consuming but I am planning to post my notes in the next few days on what we are learning as we integrate OSX into our Windows Domain.

Something you don’t see every day.

Tonight Natalie and I were heading out of the house to walk the dog and we noticed all our neighbors looking across the street from our subdivision.  I walked over to see what was going on and saw an orange single engine prop plane landing in the corn fields across the street from our house.  My neighbor Dave said the engine was sputtering and then cut out above our houses and the pilot turned the now gliding plane and landed in the corn fields.  So of course we had a new destination for our walk so we could snap a photo. (I had the phone on small photo size and didn’t realize until I got home.. so you just have to squint )

And we all thought that land option was for an elementary schooI… I didn’t know Dunlap, IL had a possible option for an ‘airstrip’… You learn something new all the time.