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Using OS X Lion Server as a Home Server (Part 11 – Shared Address Book)

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2011-10-05 09.01.49 pm

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If you’ve been enjoying our Using Apple OS X Lion Server as a Home Server series, then make sure you pick up a copy of the accompanying eBook. You’ll find additional chapters and information on using OS X Lion Server to power your digital home that won’t be available here on the site, and with all of our walkthroughs available in one convenient document (ePub or PDF), it’s far easier to install and configure your server without having to click backward and forwards to the website.

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In the last part of our series, we looked at File and Folder Sharing – one of the foundation elements of a server platform. In the next few parts, we’ll be looking more at the applications which are bundled with OS X Lion Server. First off, it’s the turn of Lion Server’s Address Book, a central repository of contacts which can be searched and accessed by users and devices across your home network. The utility of such an application should be reasonably obvious. One day, we may all settle on a cloud service that intelligently holds and de-duplicates our family’s lists of contacts, sharing them across multiple devices of various flavours. But, unless you have too much time on your hands, I’m betting that right now, your contacts are most likely a bit of a mess. Sure, your mobile phone’s contact list may be in reasonable shape – after all, it’s where you need those contacts most. But are they synced with your computers? De-duplicated? Stored securely and backed up? For all family members? Whilst Lion Server’s Shared Address Book service was originally designed to support businesses with their internal/external contact list (and still fulfills that role in many organisations) it can most definitely do a job for us at home. Let’s take a look.

Configuring OS X Lion Server’s Address Book

On the Server side, configuring Lion Server’s Address book is very simple indeed. Open up the Server App and click on the Address Book entry in the left hand pane. You’ll discover one of those big Apple switches for starting the Address Book service, alongside an option to include your directory users’ information in any search results. Select that option, and throw the switch. Down at the bottom of the panel, you’ll see messages stating that the Address Book Server is starting (good), and a second message about Writing Profile Manager settings. Remember, each time you enable a new service in the Server app, you’ll switch on additional configuration settings in Profile Manager for your network devices. That’s why, if you click briefly on Profile Manager in the left hand pane, you’ll see an Address Book icon now appears next to Include configuration for services. The new configuration settings in Profile Manager will allow you to push your shared Address Book configuration (also known as the CardDAV configuration) down to your network devices. But we’ll configure a client manually next to dig into the detail.

Configuring Your Clients to Use the Address Book Server

With the Server configured, we now need to ensure that our Mac clients on the network can take advantage of it. To do so, on your Mac go to System Preferences > Mail, Contacts & Calendars.  Select Other, and check the radio button to Add a Mac OS X server account.   With any luck, your server will pop up in the resulting panel automatically (as shown here), otherwise, drop in your server’s address where requested. You have two choices at this point, depending on how you wish to configure your shared contacts list. You can choose to allow each user to create a personal address book on the server, that will be shared across the network on multiple devices, but is only accessible by their individual user account. Or, you can create a single shared address book for the family that everyone can use. I think most households will prefer the latter, but we’ll walk through configuring both types.

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Terry Walsh is the founder of We Got Served. He started the community in February 2007 with a mission to help families, tech enthusiasts everywhere figure out the technology needed to run the modern home and small business. He's the author of a number of guides to Windows, Windows Server and OS X Server and runs his own successful publishing business. Born and raised in Liverpool, England, Terry has been awarded Microsoft's prestigious Most Valuable Professional Award each year since 2008 for his work on We Got Served.
  • Oguillau

    Very interesting series of articles. I will probably migrate … Only question I have: what about the backup of PC computers? I have not seen anything on that so far. Do you plan to write an article on this issue?

    • Yes, there will definitely be a part on backup. Glad you’re enjoying the series…

      Terry

  • Kcmedic

    I hate that this is the best (only) way to share contacts. Not very elegant, having to create users, and add users that aren’t the same as the client user.  It appears that iCloud has dropped the contacts sharing that mobileme had, but we’ll see, maybe we’ll be surprised when it launches. My biggest problem with this setup is on the iOS side. If you have a few different contact lists that you want to share, you get a mess of accounts listed in the “groups” section. Selecting a group is an all or nothing thing.  Lets say I have a list I want to share with everyone in the family (Family Contacts), I also have a list I just want to share between my wife and I. Then we each have a list that is not shared. Add to that my wife’s Exchange account, and she has 4 different accounts listed. On iOS you can either select “All Contacts” or only one of the accounts to show. Normally my wife doesn’t need the Exchange contacts cluttering up the list, but she would like to see everything else. What I’m looking for is a way to view 3 out of the 4 lists instead of all or one.  With mobileme, all the shares fall under the mobileme account, so we could show all, or just mobileme which included all the different shares as well as unshared. I guess this could be solved by allowing you to select/deselect what you want to view (the way it is in the calendar). But this current way is very unapple. Sorry for the rant, but this has been driving me crazy trying to figure out a good way to do this.

  • Jeff Hargrove

    Your series has helped me to understand and control the Lion! Thanks for your time and effort. When I set up calendar and address book accounts on my client I did not use the Mac Os X server option, I just used the options for a new caldav and CardDav accounts. Does this have any effect on the services themselves, like push, or it doesn’t make any difference at all? looking forward to the next installment of your series.

    • PhilP

      Wonderfully helpful series.  Thank you !   There are reported and as yet unresolved problems (that I’ve also experienced) getting Lion/Lion Server to work with Drobo S iSCSI and FW800 interfaces.  I’m interested to see what you experience using your Drobo S.

  • Jordan

    Hi Terry, your series has been instrumental in helping me set up a home Apple network however I’ve hit a slight stumbling block. I have setup the Address Book service to be on
    in Server.app however receive an error when trying to set up an account.
    Here are the steps I take.

    1. Login as a user (have tried local administrators, network administrators and network users on both the server and clients).

    2. System Preferences.

    3. Mail, Contacts & Calendars.

    4. Add Account – Other.

    5. Add a Mac OS X server account, Create.

    6. Select the Lion Server, Continue.

    7. Have tried combinations of Full Name, Username and Password for different users.

    8. When I click Setup it comes back with a message saying “Unable to verify user credentials”.

    There is the following entry in the console, but no other information available:

    9/10/11 11:47:48.779 PM System Preferences: The operation couldn’t be completed. (kCFStreamErrorDomainHTTP error 404.)

    I have googled everywhere and am out of ideas, I know it is a stretch asking here but do you have any suggestions at all please? Concerned my only solution is a full reinstall of Lion.

    • Hi Jordan

      From the error, it looks like the client isn’t connecting to the server – rather than selecting the server name which appears, try adding the server name manually at step 6.

      Terry

      • Jordan

        Haha Terry that worked! Thank you so much, what a silly error to overlook. As soon as I entered the FQDN of the server it worked fine. 🙂

        • Hi Jordan

          Great news – thanks for letting me know it’s all sorted out!

          Terry

        • Truls S. Yggeseth

          How did you fixed it? I have same problem.

          • Anonymous

            I had the same issue.  The mac server not populating or showing up when I wanted to add the calendar, address book and ichat settings.  I ended up rebooting my mac os X Lion 10.7 server and it resolved the issue for me.

          • Rebooting did not resolve it for me.

  • Graham

    Really great series.

    Eagerly await the calendar and rest of the series.

    Bet this has turned out a bit more work than you first anticipated 😉

  • Graham

    Really great series.

    Eagerly await the calendar and rest of the series.

    Bet this has turned out a bit more work than you first anticipated 😉

    • Thanks Graham – and yes, it’s maybe a little more comprehensive than originally planned. All good though 🙂

  • Matt

    I have a rather annoying situation where I cannot select the “Include directory contacts in search box” when setting up Address Book server or after setup. I’ve tried rebooting, resetting, and searching for an answer but haven’t turned up anything. Any ideas?

    • Mma

      You have probably chosen the ‘Local’ domain, not the /LDAPv3/127.0.1 in the Workgroup manager. If you can’t choose your server at the little down arrow, you probably haven’t set your server as Open Directory Master.

  • Cjshumate

    When I try to set up the account on a client computer, after I input the name and password, I get a message saying “lion address book couldn’t discover the accounting settings for the carddav server…” I have configured two clients computers and both give this error. While I can add entries to the Server address book, the two clients can only see their own entries.

  • David

    Terry,

    I have found your articles very helpful and have purchased your book. I am hoping it arrives tomorrow.

    In the meantime, I have run into a frustrating roadblock.

    I followed all of your instructions for setting up a shared address book. 

    I created a SharedResource User and was able to find and connect via my own local address book.

    However, when I add contacts to my SharedResource Address book on the SERVER it does not update my Address book on my MacBook Air.

    What am I missing?

    Your help would be very much appreciated.

    David

  • Belleone

    Hi Terry,

    Have you got the Profile Manager to successfully push the shared contacts address book details on iOS5? 

    I’ve got it working perfectly using the method you outline above, but when I try the Profile method then nothing happens…  I suspect that it is something to do with needing to use a Principal URL but I’ve struggling to find the right formula.  If you’ve got it working then I would really appreciate it.

    TIA

  • Karl Zarling

    Hello Terry. First off, just excellent, enough said! My question is less technical and more subjective (sorry): I’ve run OS X 10.5.8 Server on a Mac network for several years, small biz, and now have an imminent need for shared Contacts (well, I always have, but haven’t ever found what I’d consider a good replacement for Now Up To Date and Contact). I gave up using Server’s shared iCals as it was just too cumbersome for Windows clients, and now use Google Apps shared calendars for everything…but their Contacts approach has been a non-starter.

    So I need to share contacts over LAN and WAN, and ideally over the air with iOS. It seems this all appears to be, well, imminently doable within Lion Server, though maybe with some caveats, yes? I hate to change a solidly working Server OS and start over just for this, but am also predictably on a budget (gasp), so for $50 and some work maybe Lion gets me there…sort of. BTW, I’m assuming that Mac clients would need 10.6 or better, and for my couple Win clients…well, even if there is something in CardDAV world that would work, Mozilla, whatever, it does terrify me a bit, even the possibility of it compromising important Contacts in our Mac world! Any thoughts on this would be very much appreciated, and thanks again for a great resource.

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