Back in April I started a new job at an advertising agency here in Dallas. As part of the job I inherited an installation of People Cube’s Meeting Maker calendaring software running on Mac OS X 10.4 Server. One of my first thoughts was to get all of our servers off of 10.4 and on to 10.5 Leopard. As part of that process, I would obviously need to migrate Meeting Maker over to the new server software as well. Seems pretty simple, right? It wasn’t, trust me.
My train of thought was simple, create a 10.4 Open Directory replica, promote that box to master, upgrade it to 10.5, then use similar methods to get the actual OD master up to 10.5 and master again. Sounds simple, right? I thought it was too, that’s until I ran into Meeting Maker and its extended attributes. (of course Kerio has the same problem, but it is easier to get around)
Well, I did just what I said, I created a 10.4 replica and upgraded it to 10.5 and guess what, the users did not come with it. Well, not all of the users came with the upgrade. For some reason, the users showed up in Workgroup Manager, then I upgraded to 10.5 and alot of the users were gone. Like more than 75% were gone. Hmmm, interesting phenomenon going on here, I wonder what it could be.
Well, I beat on the problem a bit more, re-installing 10.4 on the replica and re-creating the replica. This time I went in to WGM before doing the upgrade. Sure enough, all of the users were there, so I restarted the server and wouldn’t you know it, 75% of them were gone again. I smell a conspiracy here.
So I got to looking at the ones that were left, and they all had a common thread: no extended attributes in the LDAP database for Meeting Maker. See, the way that Meeting Maker was set up by the consultant from People Cube was to use extended attributes in the LDAP database to put the server and login name. In our case the attributes were comMeetingMakerSignInName and comMeetingMakerCurrentServer. So, I did what any good sys admin does: I tried and tried and tried to get the data in. I tried importing via ldapadd, I tried archiving the 10.4 and restoring it into 10.5, I think I might have even tried sacrificing a small animal on the server, but nothing worked. So I resorted to the only thing I had left: calling People Cube support.
I received a call back from one of the engineers at People Cube who had no clue what was going on, so he got the consultant on the phone that helped with our original installation. Now, he listened acutely to my woes, and proceeded to inform me that Meeting Maker was never officially intended to run on Open Directory, but that it was more intentioned for OpenLDAP. Then, he told me that as far as he knew no one had put Meeting Maker on 10.5 yet. Huh? 10.5 has been out since November and no one has put it on? Crazy. He gave me some ideas, and after thinking it thru, he actually came up with something that worked.
I was able to utilize information from NetMojo, specifically this article, and sed to get it done. In the next article I’ll give the specific steps I used to get the LDAP info out and into the 10.5 server.
