Comments on: Preparing your Mac to run as a server

By: Richard

Richard — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:44:21 +0000

@Roberto, it depends… If your server is running at home make sure your last hop onto the internet (mostly your ASDL router) has a firewall turned on with the AFP ports blocking. (Preferred you block everything incoming besides web and mail)

By: Roberto

Roberto — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 22:16:39 +0000

Hi Richard I followed your tutorials and successfully installed Apache, MySQL and PHP. My only question is that I would like to share me external drive on my server with my 2 other Macs. Since you recommended to turn off Personal File Sharing how can I do this? Is their a secure way of sharing it? Thanks in advance.

By: Silver Knight

Silver Knight — Thu, 06 May 2010 00:31:51 +0000

Thank you for the useful web page and articles. Just thought I’d point out for security’s sake (since security should be if extremely high priority on a server) that using FTP and VNC as-is are both quite insecure options. The simple solution to this problem in both cases is SSH which you already installed by this point anyhow. SSH comes with SFTP (Secure FTP) capability, so you can simply disable/uninstall old (insecure) FTP.

VNC suffers from the same security issue as FTP does (namely, cleartext password transfer thru the network) but can easily be secured by using the port tunneling feature of SSH to tunnel port 5900 (or any other port being used by VNC) to the local machine which you are connecting from. Since this tunnel will be encrypted it makes VNC quite secure, AND removes the need to open extra ports at the firewall.

I realize this particular article is now unsupported, but this advice also holds true for newer server setups as well. FTP is basically obsolete and should have died ages ago, and although VNC is super useful, it tends to be insecure but easily remedied.

By: Richard

Richard — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 07:36:41 +0000

@Aaron, I have no real experience with OS X Server. But I think you can reuse the SSH stuff mentioned here to better secure your server.

By: Aaron

Aaron — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:38:08 +0000

How do you feel about the setup provided stock under Snow Leopard Server. I realize that Personal Web Sharing is not secure and not complete, but would you propose the same for the server edition of the OS?

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:12:08 +0000

Thanks for that Richard…

By: Richard

Richard — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:51:33 +0000

Yes, the order in which everything is listed is not important.

For more info you can always type “man sshd_config” in a Terminal window.

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 19:48:00 +0000

My sshd_config file doesn’t have AllowUsers or DenyUsers. Do you just add those in anywhere?

By: Richard

Richard — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:04:13 +0000

Yes you can, use the ‘dscl’ program to add your users. But be carefull on the problems with controlling them in a secure manner.

By: papalozarou

papalozarou — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:04:42 +0000

Does anyone know how to add SSH only users (i.e. user accounts that don’t exist with mac os x home folders). FTP too? I need to add these to my server, but really don’t know how.