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Viewing And Modifying SpamAssassin's AWL Auto-Whitelist in 10.5 Server

SpamAssassin in OS X 10.5 Server maintains a dynamic auto-whitelist (AWL) of email senders. The AWL modifies the calculated spam scores for incoming and outgoing email according to the previous history of emails from that sender.

Sometimes you may want to modify the AWL entry for a sender. For example, if a sender has been forwarding junk mail to the junkmail user (for spam training) rather than redirecting it then they will be flagged as the sender and not the real original sender. This will cause the local user's AWL score being moved up towards spam-sender territory and may even result in outgoing mail from that user being tagged as spam by their own email server. This would be evident by looking at the AWL score in a sent message header.

There are a couple of SpamAssassin commands for modifying AWL entries for the above scenario (but see The Modification Problem section before use)...

Cannot Change Desktop On Leopard Server

Problem: You have installed a minimum OS X Leopard Server and you cannot change the default desktop picture to another one.

Solution: Get a plain Leopard installation disk and install iPhoto.

For some reason, the desktop preferences expect to find iPhoto on your disk. Note... it expects the application, not just the iPhoto folder which gets created for the desktop preferences during the install.

Generating DNS A & PTR Records for DHCP Range

So you think it would be nice to have all your DHCP range of IPs map to hostnames... something like...

10.0.0.101 = dhcp101.foo.com
10.0.0.102 = dhcp102.foo.com
10.0.0.103 = dhcp103.foo.com etc etc

...but cannot be bothered to type them all in to your zone files? Well why not use the $GENERATE directive?

Default 10.4 Server Firewall Config

You decide to try a manual modification of the server firewall and only after finding that it has stopped working altogether, you realise that you should have taken a backup copy of the original config... DOH!

Default 10.4 Server DNS Files

Some functionality of the server's DNS is only available via manual edits. The problem with this is that any attempt to return to Server Admin management can result in whole thing going fubar.
If you need to get back to a 'clean' DNS, the default files for Tiger Server are here...

Panther DNS

I previously posted this on Apple's forum but it seems to have dropped off into the archive pit. Replicated here for someone who was looking for it..

DNS Basic Setup for Panther Server

This is intended to get people started. "Started" is what it means - if you want to get more complex then you should read up on DNS (plenty of web sources available for learning). You can mess things up pretty quick if you do something wrong!