MacStadium Blog

MacStadium has officially released Orka, our new virtualization layer for Mac build infrastructure based on Docker and Kubernetes technology. In this video, the MacStadium team shares why Orka was created, how Orka works, why building on Macs is different than other platforms, and much more.

Participating in the Orka beta program this summer, Homebrew teamed up with MacStadium to test the macOS Catalina beta on Orka to great success.

Released today, Orka (Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple) is our new virtualization layer for Mac build infrastructure based on Docker and Kubernetes technology.

We've set out to discover best practices when virtualizing with vSphere and Jenkins when paired with MacStadium. Read what we consider to be the best way to produce ephemeral VMs.

CI/CD, regardless of the OS associated with it, is generally the same at a high level. However, there are some distinctions in the world of Mac CI/CD including Mac-specific tools and best practices.

In the latest in a series of helpful posts for new MacStadium adopters, get tips for using HashiCorp's Terraform with each of MacStadium's virtualization platforms.

In a series of blog posts, we will provide some pointers and a few examples for new MacStadium adopters to use as a guide. Let's start with Ansible...

Apple highlighted Catalyst’s new features and increased functionality at WWDC. When mass adoption hits, there will need to be some changes to Mac-related CI workflows.

Provisioning your Mac cloud virtual machines for macOS and iOS CI just got easier. MacStadium engineers have put together some example Ansible scripts for provisioning your CI build environment.

Without users for the platforms we build, even the most groundbreaking applications can quickly turn into shelfware. Humans, of course, can be unpredictable and demanding but—love or hate them—they’re the reason we build platforms in the first place.

While macOS Mojave is primarily a consumer focused release, there are also lots of performance and stability improvements that will make MacStadium customers happy. Find out what you need to know about upgrading here.

Text replacement snippets are a useful tool that can be used on macOS and iOS. You create shortcut text that, when typed, expands to something longer.

High Sierra is almost among us. Here are a few things you should consider as you decide to upgrade to macOS 10.13.

There is a new terminal server option for Mac. It is called NuoRDS. It is simple to install, has a number of options and is quite well developed.

The venerable Panic Inc announced Transmit 5 today, and update to a very popular file transfer app that just gets better and better.

As iOS becomes more powerful, and screens get larger and larger, many people are traveling with just an iPhone or iPad.

Bjango is a well respected and long time developer for great Mac and iOS apps. They have released new apps that will help you monitor your remote servers from your Mac or iOS devices.

While there are many brave souls who updated to macOS 10.12 Sierra immediately, we're sure many of you were waiting for the all clear.

This update brings all sorts of upgrades and features, but there is one particular that is quite useful if you are running a Mac server to host your mail, notes, calendars and other features in macOS Server.

Resilio Sync is a power application that lets you run your own file syncing server. It has many of the powerful features found in Dropbox, but it runs on your own hardware.

"Why do I have constant issues connecting to my colocated Mac running OS X?" This question doesn't come up often, but it’s worth sharing the most likely answer and how to fix the issue permanently.

Many MacStadium customers take advantage of the fast internet connection and strong performance of one or more Mac mini’s to outsource CI and CD build server duties.

With the software industry moving forward rapidly and trends shifting, a delay in product release can be disastrous for a company.

Travis CI is one of the best examples of a company succeeding in the continuous integration space with a variety of free and paid, open and closed source platforms.

"It's been way too long." That’s the cryptic message Apple sent out a few weeks ago as a teaser to its big announcement made today.

Utilizing a hosted Mac at MacStadium to run Plex media server is a great solution! Plex organizes video, music and photos from personal media libraries and streams them to smart TVs, streaming boxes and mobile devices.

Several weeks ago, we have obtained a working patch which corrects this condition for 10.9.x and 10.10.x. It is our understanding that this patch will eventually be incorporated into a future version of OS X 10.10.x Mavericks.

Configuring a hosted Mac server at MacStadium to run a dedicated OwnCloud private cloud storage solution is a great solution for businesses of any size!

Great news from Apple today! OS X 10.9 aka 'Mavericks' is now available on the App store for FREE as a single step upgrade for all Mac mini server hardware 2009 and beyond!

Part two of a 4-part series designed to get new subscribers educated, configured, tested, and ultimately up and running with their Mac servers at MacStadium.

This is a 4 part series designed to get new subscribers educated, configured, tested, and ultimately up and running with their Mac servers at MacStadium.

SSH allows you to connect securely to your server. In this screencast I walk you through connecting to your server using SSH.

SFTP is basically FTP through SSH which makes the communications secure back and forth.

With the move from 10.6 to 10.7 and 10.8, Apple has still made the Work Group Manager Application available to those who still like the old UI of the application.

Continued coverage of Work Group Manager. If you haven't viewed the previous screencast on Work Group Manager, you will want to view that one first before this one.

Because your server is in a hosted environment accessing your server remotely is a must if you are to manage it and get all you can out of it.

With so many people using mobile devices as their primary platform, it is important to have a way to share files with those mobile devices from your server.

One of the advantages of using the built in wiki is you can customize it to fit your needs. The wiki can be a great resource to collaborate with others and to share files.

With Wiki website, Apple gives you a prebuilt template for a wiki that you can use to host your own wiki, blogs, and other online features like an online calendar.

Profile Manager allows you to manage many of the details of setting up your devices so you only have to set it up once and then push those profiles to all your devices.

Once you have Profile Manager set up you can begin to create profiles that you can use to manage your clients and their devices.

Not only does Profile Manager allow you to enroll your Macs in the service, you can also enroll your iOS devices as well.

In order for your Mac's to be able to receive profiles they need to be enrolled in the Profile Manager Service.

Built into Mountain Lion Server is a Website Service that allows you to host multiple websites and does all of the routing internally to the proper address.

One of the benefits of hosting your own server at MacStadium is being able to host your own mail server. Built right into Mountain Lion Server is a Mail Server that can handle the email for your domain.

Back ups are something we all need to do and make sure all of our client machines are doing to protect our data. In addition to local back ups it is a good idea to have remote back ups as well.

FTP is a service that most people think about when they think about servers. FTP has been the way many people upload files to servers and while it is an older service it is something many still rely on today.

Secure connections are something most of us think about today especially on unsecured public wifi networks. A VPN connection can create an encrypted connection to keep all of your data safe.

With your hosted Mountain Lion Server you have a messages service built in that you can configure and control to suit whatever your needs are.

In Mountain Lion Server there is a built in contact service that allows you to set up your own private contacts cloud to keep your contact data in sync across your various devices.

Running a Mountain Lion Server calendar yourself adds privacy to your schedule and allows you to have complete control over who views and uses your calendar.

Once your shares are set up and you have all your file sharing permission set, you will want to start using those shares and get to them in the most convenient way possible.

File sharing is one of the basic services we all expect from a server. Having access to our files and folders from anywhere on whatever devices we are makes sure that we are never without the documents we need.

Once you have set up your Open Directory Master it is time to add network accounts to your server.

One of the benefits of OS X Server is the built in MDM (Mobile Device Management) service called Profile Manager.

An Open Directory allows for network accounts and is required for some of Mountain Lion's services like Profile Manager.

In this screencast I cover the DNS Service in Mountain Lion Server. DNS is the most critical service that must be functioning correctly if all the other services are going to work in OS X Server.

In this tutorial I cover how to set up SSL Certificates to use the services in Mountain Lion Server.

In this screencast I cover the advanced OSX Firewall configuration using the 3rd party IceFloor Firewall utility and talk about the notion of 'port forwarding'.

Because all the ports on your Mac Mini are open in a hosted environment, it becomes more important to deploy a firewall to control who can have access to what services.

In this screen-cast I cover how to install the Mac OS X Server application for 10.8.x Mountain Lion and walk you through the entire installation process for your hosted Mac mini Server at MacStadium.

In this screen-cast I will cover how to get started with your new Hosted Mac mini Server at MacStadium.

OSX Server for Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8.x) is an add-on which can be purchased for $19.99 from the Apple App Store and installed on any Apple Mac server running here at MacStadium.

Last year, we ran some blog articles about video performance using various remote desktop programs for remotely managing a Mac mini in the MacStadium datacenter.