HCS Blog

The Caching Service updates it's registration with Apple every 55 minutes, as registrations expire on Apple's side after 1 hour. This mechanism not only allows for a crashed Caching server to be removed from registry but also to track changes in the public IP.

Changing the Only cache content for local networks setting causes an immediately re-registration, removing the local network range from the registration payload when the setting is turned off.

On Stop
When the Caching Server stops it deregisters with lcdn-registration.apple.com allowing clients to download updates from Apple servers again.

The –perfmode option indicates whether or not the performance mode has been enabled, dedicating resources to binaries within the Server app:

serverinfo --perfmode

If the performance mode has not been enabled then the output will be as such:

Server performance mode is NOT enabled.
To enable performance mode, you can also use serverinfo. This is the only task that the command does that can make any changes to the system and as such is the only time you need to elevate privileges:

sudo serverinfo —setperfmode 1

Or set the boolean value back to 0 to disable.

sudo serverinfo —setperfmode 0

Command to Troubleshoot OS X Server

Location of executable: /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/sbin

OS X Server includes a very robust mail server, that while not widely used by the IT community, uses tried-and-true open source software (dovecot and postfix) for POP, IMAP, and SMTP services. However, the Server app interface does leave many configurable options out of the user interface, and one important one is the maximum e-mail attachment size for your message. So, if you need to change it, you need to know the size in bytes. There are many megabyte to byte calculators on the internet.

First, find out the current maximum attachment size.

postconf | grep message_size_limit

This should return 10 MB in bytes, which is

message_size_limit = 10240000

Use postconf to change this. In this case, I am changing it to 50 MB

postconf -e message_size_limit=52428800

And finally, reload postfix

sudo postfix reload

You're done!

For people who are not comfortable configuring their Brocade switches from the Terminal, it is possible to configure it using the GUI interface and Java on your Mac.

You need Java 7 for this to work.  I used Java 7 update 79 on OS X Yosemite and was able to configure a Brocade 6500 switch with no issues.  Java 8 will NOT work.


Step 1.  Go to System Preferences and click on the “Java” pane.  

Step 2.  Go to the “Security” tab and add an entry for your brocade switch to the exceptions list.

Step 3.  Quit System Preferences when done.

Step 4.  Launch “Terminal” and enter the command below.  

NOTE:  Change the IP address to the IP address of your Brocade Switch.

javaws http://192.168.5.10/switchExplorer_installed.html

This will launch the Java runtime environment and you will be able configure the switch from your Mac.

An interesting new feature of Caching Server 5 is the ability to cache personal iCloud data.  There could be a variety of reasons why this may not be desirable in some environments, one of which could be concerns over storage capacity on the caching server.  Here is how to disable that feature using the serveradmin command in Terminal:

sudo serveradmin settings caching:AllowPersonalCaching = no

Change that boolean field to yes to re-enable this feature.