Chapter 8. Additional Basic Admin Tools

In This Chapter

  • Monitoring server

  • statistics from

  • Dashboard with the

  • Server Status widget

  • Upgrading to

  • advanced tools

In addition to using Server Preferences to activate and configure basic services, Mac OS X Server in the standard and workgroup configurations also presents a Server Status widget for remote monitoring of server statistics from Dashboard.

This widget can be installed on any computer running Mac OS X Snow Leopard as part of the Mac OS X Server Admin tools package. Multiple servers can each be monitored with separate instances of the widget.

Apart from presenting a simple overview of the network, CPU, and disk resources in use on a given server, the widget also presents the status of services running on the server and provides links to the appropriate panes in Server Preferences for each.

Although the Server Status widget can be used with servers running in advanced configuration, those servers don't use the basic Server Preferences and don't even allow a remote connection from computers running the application. Therefore, the direct links to Server Preferences presented within the Server Status widget won't work.

That makes the rather limited utility of the Server Status widget of much use only to server administrators with the basic needs of a standard or workgroup configuration.

Outside of the Server Status widget, a variety of other graphical and command-line tools exist that can be used in Mac OS X Server under the standard or workgroup ...

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