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FIX ENTOURAGE/OUTLOOK 2011 INCOMING MAIL ISSUE

Exchange accounts on Entourage 2008 and Outlook 2011 for Mac are both susceptible to cache corruption- often leaving a user's inbox 'frozen'. If email is flowing to OWA but new messages aren't showing up in the inbox on Entourage or Outlook 2011, the problem may be a cache issue.

To resolve a caching issue, right-click (or ctr+click) on the inbox and choose Folder Properties. Hit the Empty button to purge the cache. Entourage (or Outlook 2011) will then empty the cached contents of the inbox and repopulate itself from the Exchange Server. Any local items in your inbox that have not synced to the server will be lost, but usually the server contents are more complete. *Note, this operation will appear to freeze the entire application for several minutes, and repopulation from the Exchange Server can take 1-2 hours depending on your connection speed and the amount of mail in your inbox.

APPLESCRIPT: CHANGE SOFTWARE UPDATE SERVER

This is a bump for a hint posted by flammable over on Mac OS X hints - these AppleScripts for setting an OS X client to use a local Software Update server are so useful they deserve some new air time.


Ref this link: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20091002190708159

TEST SMTP AUTH CONNECTIVITY

Here's a useful way to test smtp settings when troubleshooting an email client or "scan to email" settings on a multifunction copier/scanner:

Use terminal to telnet to your sendmail server, specify the port you will use to connect.  Many mail servers accept smtp auth requests on port 465 or 587. 

Once connected you can authenticate as a known user by issuing the "auth login" command - the key here is that you need to convert your plain text user credentials using base 64 encoding.  A simple conversion tool can be found at http://www.base64converter.com

SNOW LEOPARD SERVER BUILT-IN FIREWALL

While Macs remain inherently secure due to a variety of factors, it's still possible to have to your Snow Leopard server hacked if you've assigned it a public IP address.  Using the built-in firewall in Snow Leopard server is a quick way to achieve better security, even if it's just a temporary solution until your network can be secured using more robust technologies. 

Select the Firewall service in Server Admin and allow only traffic from "any" to these ports:

TCP (outgoing)

TCP (established)

UDP Fragments

UDP outbound and responses to same port

DNS - responses to outbound queries

Serial number support

ICMP - echo reply messages (replies to outgoing pings)

ICMP - echo requests messages (incoming pings)

Next allow local lan traffic-- in many cases the built-in 10-net or 192.168-net default settings can be used by selecting Allow All Traffic.  If your network uses a different IP range, create a group using the CIDR notation for your network range and Allow All to that group.  For example, Group Name = LAN, addresses in group = 172.16.0.0/12

That's it- save changes and hit start. Be aware that you've now blocked all external access to your server on important services such as SSH and ARD, so you'll no longer have remote control of your server. 

ALLOW NON-ADMINS ACCESS TO SYSTEM PREFS

Here's a great way to allow standard users to change settings normally reserved for admin users (such as energy settings, date & time, etc).

You'll need to be comfortable with the command line to do this but it's fairly straightforward:
Using your favorite text editor, sudo into the authorizations file at /etc/authorization and change as follows:

Old

<key>system.preferences</key>

<dict>
<key>group</key>
<string>admin</string>

<key>shared</key>
<true/>

<key>allow-root</key>

<true/>
</dict>



New



<key>system.preferences</key>
<dict>

<key>group</key>

<string>staff</string>

<key>shared</key>
<true/>

<key>allow-root</key>
<true/>

</dict>

Save changes and exit the file.  This allows non-admins access to ALL system preferences except Accounts.   As an admin, you may not want standard users to be able to change the startup disk-- you can change that by modifying that specific preference pane -- again, via the command line:

sudo chgrp -R admin /System/Library/PreferencePanes/StartupDisk.prefPane
sudo chmod -R u=rwx,g=rwx,o=r /System/Library/PreferencePanes/StartupDisk.prefPane

ref this post on MacNN Forums:
http://forums.macnn.com/90/mac-os-x/216189/editing-etc-authorization-file-panther-how/