Trac is an issue tracking system for software development projects. It integrates with Subversion (SVN), and is considered one of the better issue trackers out there because it is light weight and doesn’t bog down issue tracking with huge numbers of options that confuse the user.

Getting Trac running on OS X Leopard Server is quite simple, though it does require some use of the Terminal application. The following is a tutorial on installing Trac, with an emphasis on doing so in the most OS X way possible, and integrating with Open Directory for authentication (the standard user authentication method used by Leopard Server).
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It’s surprising that, given Subversion (SVN) is an Apple officially supported revision control system for development (Xcode has support for it), Leopard Server has no real GUI support for getting a subversion server up and running (or any other revision control system server). Yes, Leopard Server does ship with Subversion. But to use it for your internal projects there is quite a bit of setup required.

There are a number of resources on the net showing how to setup Subversion on Leopard Server, but just about every tutorial I’ve seen ends up with something that works - but if you make any unrelated changes to your web server with the Server Admin tool at a later date you end up changing your SVN settings and having to redo them.

What I propose below is a general way to avoid this problem that can be applied to Subversion and other tools. I also try and do this in the most OS X way I can, using OS X style folder locations and naming, and the Server Admin tool wherever possible. Further, I show how to integrate with Open Directory for authentication (the standard user authentication method used by Leopard Server).
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When we first installed Leopard Server, we found that Spotlight wasn’t working on the server by default. A number of people have also found this to be true, and some people have suggested it may have something to do with installing on to a RAID 1 drive setup (as we did).

The following is a possibly solution to get Spotlight working if you are having this issue¹.

1. Login in to your server as an administrator.
2. Open the Terminal application (in your /Applications/Utilities folder)
3. Type the following exactly as written in to the Terminal:
   
   

   sudo rm /.metadata_never_index

   It will ask you for your password. You may get a “file not found” error, as the file has only been reported as being there for some users. Regardless, move to step 4.

4. Type the following in to the Terminal:
   
   

   sudo mdutil -i on /

Spotlight in the right corner of the menu of your server login should indicate it is indexing, and before long will start working.

1. This post is based on a discussion in Apple Discussions, and fixed the problem we had been having with out server.

Leopard Server makes use of Open Directory, an LDAP based directory service of resources - including users and shared contact information. As I mentioned in a previous article, you can set up other Address Book software (such as Thunderbird’s) to access the shared contacts using LDAP.

When it comes to editing these shared contacts, things are a little less straightforward. Leopard comes with an application called “Directory”, that allows you add/delete and edit shared contacts. The trouble is, in doing this, it uses non-standard LDAP attributes (not that there is a “standard” as such, but the ones they use aren’t even used by their own Address Book application). So it is best you just ignore this feature of Directory until Apple fix it - (I’ve logged it with Apple - radar bug report number 5801945).

If you are on a Mac, your best bet is to create your shared contact in Address Book, and then drag the entry to Directory. This works great, except that “notes” are lost. - I’ve logged this as a bug with Apple (radar bug report number 5818049)

If you aren’t on a Mac, or you don’t like the Address Book hack to get around Directory issues, you need another tool to edit the shared contacts. I have found very few tools that could authenticate with a default Open Directory set up - mainly because the client needs to be able to authenticate with SASL, and handle CRAM-MD5 challenge responses.

The one LDAP editor I found that works is Apache Directory Studio.

Once installed, the settings are basically (assuming your Leopard server has domain “yamato.internal“):

Network Parameter
Hostname: yamato.internal
Port: 389
Encryption: [No encryption or SSL]

Authentication
Authentication Method: CRAM-MD5 (SASL)
Bind DN or User: [Your OD username]
Bind Password: [Your OD password]

Browser Options
Base DN: cn=people,dc=yamato,dc=internal

Leave all other entries as defaults.

Once setup, you can connect and browse to entries. You can edit the entries and save them as required.

This means you can, for example, easily edit an existing shared contact. You could even use it as a crude way to enter shared contacts, by creating a template entry, and using that for new entries. Not pretty, but at least will give you correct attributes for LDAP Address Book searches.

There are better LDAP based address books with editing capabilities on the net, but I couldn’t find any that could authenticate with Open Directory beyond the one mentioned here. If you find any, leave me a note in the comments.