AFP548.com has a write-up on Mac OS X Server v10.4 available which covers some of the major changes in the newest version of Apple’s server software. Of particular interest are changes made to LDAP/Open Directory, including a one-step backup option for directory data:
Another, terrific feature, is the ability to easily dump your entire OD system out to an archive and restore it later. This feature backs up everything, and I mean everything, related to your OD setup onto an encrypted sparse image. At any time in the future you can select a backup image and restore your OD system to that point in time. Nice. Good backups of you OD system are more critical than ever now with the introduction of the GUIDs for users and groups. The backups are all done through the Server Admin GUI and can also be done from the serveradmin command to allow for easy scripting of this feature.
I’ve been using a slightly modified version of Tim Wilkinson’s LDAP backup script to do this for the time being; it’s nice to see an officially-supported solution from Apple, though.
The article also touches on the new Portable Home Directories feature, access control lists, improvements to Apple’s RAID drivers, multicast image serving (this is going to be hugely popular with people who use asr to build and deploy software images), the new Software Update, iChat, and Weblog services, and improvements to built-in services such as NAT, DHCP, SMB, web serving, email, printing, and NetBoot/NetRestore, among others. Hopefully there’ll be follow-up articles on most of these changes in the coming weeks and months.
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