While importing a placeholder for some iPads into Profile Manager I was peeking through profilemanager.log, when I found this gem. What I did next was add a new column AirplayPassword= to the placeholder CSV file and put a password in. I then uploaded the placeholder for an AppleTV and it added the Airplay password to my AppleTV Device in ProfileManager.

Just yesterday I added 20 AppleTVs to Profile Manager, I could have saved a few steps with this hint.

[crarko adds: If you don't know about Apple Profile Manager for OS X Server here is a description of it's capabilities. Perhaps they've noticed penetration of AppleTV's into business and college conference rooms. I've been seeing more of them used basically as portable projectors.]

So you finally want to take the plunge and convert from gitolite managed repositories and Jenkins to doing everything with Mavericks' Xcode Server? It turns out it's actually not that hard.

Disclaimer: I just figured this process out, everything appears to work (pulling the repository, committing/pushing back to the repository after making changes. I think that everything should be working properly outside of my very basic tests, but they were very limited.

Converting gitolite repositories for Xcode server.

• Find your repositories folder (for me i had a special 'git' user so the repositories folder was in /Users/git/repositories).
• Create a tarred gzip file (as admin with following settings) to create carbon copies of the directories preserving ownership and permissions:
  
  sudo tar cpz -P --exclude .DS_Store -f repositories.tgz /Users/git/repositories


• Copy this tgz file to the new server (if it is in fact a new server).
• Extract the file to your Desktop.
• Change the owner to the proper owner expected by Mavericks' Xcode server:
  
  sudo chown -R 94:70 ~/Desktop/respositories/


• Change the directories to have the proper permissions:
  
  sudo chmod -R 0777 ~/Desktop/repositories


• Each repository has a config file inside it, gitolite gives different default configs than Xcode server, and it's important that they match up with what Apple expects. For my gitolite config files they all looked like this:

  	[core]
  		repositoryformatversion = 0
  		filemode = true
  		bare = true
  		ignorecase = true
  		precomposeunicode = false
  

  While an example test repository made from scratch with Mavericks' Xcode Server is:

  	[core]
  		repositoryformatversion = 0
  		filemode = true
  		bare = true
  		ignorecase = true
  		precomposeunicode = true
  		sharedrepository = 1
  	[receive]
  		denyNonFastforwards = true
  

  So I replaced all the config files contents for every repository with that and everything appears to work seamlessly as if Xcode had created the repositories.
• Make sure the server app is NOT running and then move all of your repositories into /Library/Server/Xcode/Respositories/git/
• 9. Open the Server app, choose the Xcode option in the sidebar and then choose the Repositories tab and all of your repositories SHOULD be visible. This will keep your commit histories intact (I havent tried reverting to them or anything, but I assume it should work)

For the more curious, this is how I determined the gid's for _teamserver and _www:

dscl . -list /Users UniqueID

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one, but I am planning to set up such a server so it would be great to hear what people think of Xcode server in general, as well as the specifics of this hint.]

The following AppleScript will use Remote Desktop to set a non-default NetBoot image as the startup disk. Make sure to insert your server's IP Address and the image name...

A new feature in the latest update to OS X Server is a caching server. This is designed to cache files in setups with multiple users so files only need to be downloaded once from the internet (or from the Mac App Store, iTunes Store, etc.). Files are cached locally, so users can save time getting downloads.

Apple has published a technical note explaining how to configure the caching server. You can set a limit to the amount of disk space used for the cache, you can choose a location for the cache, set the number of concurrent clients accessing it and much more.

This looks like a valuable feature for any organization running OS X Server.

Apple has published a technical document explaining how to set message size limits for the mail server in OS X Server. By default, messages are limited to 10 MB, but you can change this from the command line using the serveradmin command:

sudo serveradmin settings mail:postfix:message_size_limit = number

See Apple's technical document for more information, and how to specify the number in the command above.

Apple has published a technical note explaining how to enable the AFP Server Activity log on OS X Server; this log is not enabled by default.

Run the following command to enable this log:

sudo serveradmin settings afp:activityLog=yes

To disable the log, run this command:

sudo serveradmin settings afp:activityLog=no

Apple recently published a technical note explaining how to enable the adaptive firewall in OS X Server. This is a type of firewall that automatically creates temporary rules according to certain events. For example, a number of failed login attempts will cause the adaptive firewall to create a temporary rule to block the IP address attempting to log in.

To do this, run the following commands as an administrative user: Then, edit /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.pfctl.plist using the following commands: Another technical note explains how to resolve an issue where packet rules do not load.

For more information, see man afctl and this post on the techorganic blog.

Apple has published a technical note explaining how to repair an Xsan file system. They explain that one uses the following commands to do this:

sudo cvfsck -j VolumeName
sudo cvfsck -nv VolumeName

Note that this is different from the standard fsck command used with a regular file system. See the Apple document for more information on using this command.

If you use Lion Server, and its wiki server, you may find it useful to use custom URL protocols for internal documents and links. Apple has published a technical note explaining how to do this. This document explains how to create the necessary configuration file - /etc/collabd/filter_whitelist.plist - for any custom URL protocol you wish to use.

I have had nothing but trouble with SMB (Windows Sharing) services in Mac OS X Server 10.7. These problems were supposedly solved in 10.7.3, but my particular issues seem to still be there in several cases (Windows XP name browsing not working, Guest access not working, performance issues, dropped connections), and may be related to the Windows XP (versus Windows Vista/7) clients I'm dealing with. All of these were working fine with Mac OS X Server 10.5.8 when a string of hardware failures required replacement with the current version, which is working well for the Mac OS X clients.

I have found that replacing the Apple supplied services with the open source Samba version (dropped by Apple in Mac OS X Lion for apparent licensing issues) has solved these problems, and provided faster performance. Unfortunately setup isn't well documented, takes a while, and has no GUI tool (SharePoints I miss you!).

In hopes that I can give someone a head start for doing this if they need to, I've cobbled together a recipe from various sources. There are likely some flaws, and it is probably missing some details and options. Please feel free to add or update in the comments.