Duplicating service settings under OSX Server…


This mainly applies to how you deal with a backup DHCP server and it’s configuration, but might also be useful for backing up other service settings. One of the things that kinda bugs me about how some services are configured in OSX Server is the fact that the configurations are stored in the directory. For example, if you have a DHCP server servicing a subnet with a ton of reservations hardcoded in it, there is no way of editing and/or moving the information from the command line (ie: there is no single config file that contains the current configuration) to another server. That’s where the “serveradmin” commandline program comes to rescue. If you have two identical servers (ie: both running the same OSX server version), you can use serveradmin to export the settings from a specific service and then move the file to the new server and import it there. All using the CLI.

  • To Export the settings (in this case the DHCP service):
  • sudo serveradmin settings dhcp > dhcp-config.txt
  • To Import the settings on the other server:
  • sudo serveradmin settings < dhcp-config.txt
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