Specifications

Conguration Tools
Address Book Server uses four Mac OS X front-end tools:
Server Admin for Mac OS X Â
The  serveradmin tool
Server Preferences Â
The  carddavd tool
In each case, the front-end tools reads from a conguration plist le (/etc/carddavd/
carddavd.plist) to set service parameters. The plist le is an XML property list that
species server options such as:
The network TCP port to bind to Â
Whether to use SSL Â
The names and locations of support les Â
User Provisioning
Address Book Server users are provisioned in Open Directory. The Address Book Server
requires that the computer running the server is also acting as an Open Directory Master.
Process and Load Management
The daemon for Address Book Server can run in master, slave, or combined mode.
Master mode: Acts as a load balancer for slave mode daemons. When Address Book
Server is running in this mode, it forwards connection requests to another instance of
the daemon running in slave mode.
Slave mode: Accepts forwarded connections delegated by the master process. This
process replies to client requests and accesses the contact data store, answers HTTP
requests, and does event parsing.
Combined mode (default): Acts as both master and slave. It spawns one slave process
for every processor core available on the server. It also acts as its own load-balancing
master, delegating connections to its own spawned slave mode daemons. For these
processes to be balanced, they must have a shared storage location. This can be as
simple as a single le–system location for a multiprocessor Xserve. If the processes are
spread between several servers, the servers must use a shared storage solution like Xsan.
If the master processes can’t adequately distribute the load, you can use a hardware
load balancer built to handle web connections.
26 Chapter 3 Advanced Address Book Server Information