Deploying and supporting Macs presents distinct challenges, particularly in organizations where Macs are in the minority or are being introduced for the first time. As with many aspects of IT, having the right tool for the job is the key to managing a new or existing population of Apple desktops and notebooks.

The good news is that there are many tried and true solutions for handling common Mac deployment and management tasks. The better news is that many of the best are available for free, whether from Apple, as open source projects, or as free/donationware creations of other Mac administrators and IT professionals.

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Here you will find the top 22 tools -- most of them free -- for managing the Macs in your IT environment. As you'd expect, the list focuses on the core areas of systems administration: deployment, client management, and directory integration. If I missed a favorite free Mac tool, please highlight it in the comments below.

Essential Mac tools Nos. 1 and 2: Disk Utility and Apple Software Restore
If you have more than a couple of Macs to deal with, you'll need an easy way to configure them. For monolithic imaging, the process by which you create a snapshot of one workstation and copy it to others, nothing beats Apple's Disk Utility and Apple Software Restore, both of which are included free with every Mac OS X install.

Disk Utility comes as both a GUI tool and the diskutil command-line option. It is equipped with plenty of local disk management functions, including partitioning, formatting, integrity checking, and repair. It also offers the ability to clone volumes and create disk images using the .dmg format, which makes it perfect for capturing a configured volume for monolithic imaging.

Apple Software Restore, which is available only from the command line as asr, allows you to locally or remotely deploy disk images to one or more clients. It can be used to image a Mac from a disk image on a local drive, a network share, or a multicast stream (the best option for mass deployments). When used for multicast streaming, one Mac hosts the stream via asr commands for others to join. As you might expect, any client imaged using asr must be booted from a source other than the destination volume, such as an external hard drive, a flash drive, or a bootable network volume.

While Disk Utility and ASR provide the backbone for Mac deployment, either individually using an external drive/unicast network connection or a multicast stream, there are several tools to speed up, automate, and improve your workflow for capturing a source image, preparing it for use with ASR, and initiating deployment. Be sure to check out SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner for image capture and basic single-Mac deployment, and Blast Image Config for setting up ASR sessions.

Apple addresses troublesome Lion server issues http://t.co/AXLYm4nF

Press C during startup Start up from a bootable CD or DVD, such as the Mac OS X Install disc that came with the computer.
Press D during startup Start up in Apple Hardware Test (AHT).
Press Option-Command-P-R until you hear startup sound a second time. Reset NVRAM
Press Option during startup Start up in Startup Manager, where you can select a Mac OS X volume to start from. Note: Press N to make the the first bootable Network volume appear as well.
Press Eject, F12, or hold the mouse or trackpad button Ejects any removable media, such as an optical disc.
Press N during startup Attempt to start up from a compatible network server (NetBoot).
Press T during startup Start up in Target Disk Mode.
Press Shift during startup Start up in Safe Boot mode and temporarily disable login items.
Press Command-V during startup Start up in Verbose mode.
Press Command-S during startup Start up in Single-User mode.
Press Option-N during startup Start from a NetBoot server using the default boot image.
Press Command-R during startup
Start from Lion Recovery1

've upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion, then I purchased and installed the Server from App Store.

Now I'd like to remove the Server features, and revert to standard Lion. I don't mind reinstalling, I don't want to reformat, or restore from backup.

What is the most correct and complete process?

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Xymon is a tool for monitoring servers, applications and networks. It collects information about the health of your computers, the applications running on them, and the network connectivity between them. All of this information is presented in a set of simple, intuitive webpages that are updated frequently to reflect changes in the status of your systems.

Xymon is capable of monitoring a vast set of network services, e.g. mail-servers, web-servers (both plain HTTP and encrypted HTTPS), local server application logs, ressource utilisation and much more.

Boolean logic in the server

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Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed. The FriendFeed application is written using a web framework that looks a bit like web.py or Google's webapp, but with additional tools and optimizations to take advantage of the underlying non-blocking infrastructure.

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Learn about training programs, service and support options, developer information, and more

You've reached freenode, a service of Peer-Directed Projects Center (PDPC). freenode provides discussion facilities for the Free and Open Source Software communities, for not-for-profit organizations and for related communities and organizations. In 1998, the network had about 200 users and less than 20 channels. Ten years down the line the network currently peaks at just under 60,000 users,

CacheFly's Global Network is trusted by some of the largest names on the web to handle even the largest of “flash crowds” and provides the best performance in the industry.

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XAMPP for Mac OS X is the simplest, most practical and most complete webserver solution for Mac OS X. The distribution includes an Apache 2 web server, integrated with the latest builds of MySQL, PHP and Perl. It comes as a Mac OS X Installer package which contains all the necessary files and requires no dependencies.

If you are an experienced web developer or a Mac enthusiast who needs to run a webserver, create dynamic webpages or use databases, this is your lucky day!
This version is for Mac OS X 10.4 (Intel&PPC) and higher.

SuperCollider 3 Server on Linux
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● Server
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● SCEL
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Time to talk about it.
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Welcome to QuickTime Streaming Server, the standards-based streaming media server that combines industrial strength support with engaging ease of use.