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CardDAV CalDAV autodiscovery on Mac OS X and iOS

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UPDATE 2 4/8/2012: It’s been a year and a half (almost), but Apple finally fixed CalDAV SRV record discovery in, I believe, iOS 5.0.2 (and therefore 5.1). So all of this is now completely valid, and supported by Apple (finally)!

UPDATE 12/18/2010: It’s taken me a bit to post this (sorry), but I can say that iOS 4.2.1 (the released version of 4.2) supports discovery of CardDAV servers over SRV records. However, CalDAV does NOT work. I’ve been told by people in the know that it’s coming, it just didn’t make it into 4.2.1. Now, I have no idea why… one would think it’s the same back-end, but who knows. Anyway, CardDAV works, CalDAV doesn’t, but hopefully 4.3 (or whatever they call it) will fix that.

Part of being a systems administrator is making the life of your customers easier. Whether it’s having a file share auto-mount when they login, having to only remember a single password (or just having to login once via SSO), or in this case, not having to remember what server provides what services. So, over the past few days I’ve been playing with autodiscovery of CalDAV and CardDAV for Mac OS X and iOS.

Address Book and iCal in 10.6 use SRV records nicely. If I tell iCal that my server is www.example.com, and I have an SRV records that say:

_caldav._tcp.www.example.com. 86400 IN SRV 0 0 8008 caldav.example.com.
_caldavs._tcp.www.example.com. 86400 IN SRV 0 0 8443 caldav.example.com.

iCal magically figures out that my actual caldav server is caldav.example.com (it defaults to lookup caldavs first, then caldav if caldavs isn’t available). I have a similar SRV record set up for CardDAV:

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Night at work…

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Spent most of the night last night at work, or back at home waiting for something to finish. Huge PITA. 

The term starts on Monday, so I had to get everything rebooted, and systems updated for the term. Because there are always people in the SOJC, it’s difficult to schedule downtime. I hope to be able to schedule outages this term as I have in the past, so that I can apply various updates. Got the firmware updated on our primary server switch, and the fibre channel switch (things that really can’t be done during the term due to possible failure). 

After that, I tried to get kerberos fixed on the OD server. No love. Archive, Demote, Promote, restore. Then try a slapconfig -kerberize… boom! kerberos dies horribly. Tried removing all of kerberos and starting from scratch, no go. kdcsetup results in a segfault… awesome. So, going to have to push this one back to later in the term, or Summer break. I hope to have it fixed before migrating to 10.6. 

Speaking of which, the possibility of migrating to 10.6 looks tenuous at best. We currently have 5 Intel Xserves, hosting student data (users on one, group shares on another), FCS, the primary MDC, and the website. This leaves email, OD, and the secondary MDC on PPCs, which won’t do 10.6. I’m really really hoping to get 2 more Xserves out of our dwindling budget, but who knows what will happen. With two, I could move OD to the secondary MDC, then migrate mail to the other Xserve. This would be a bare minimum. I’d get to retire our old first generation Xserves, and put the backup server on a G5 Xserve, as well as have another G5 Xserve for… something. 

Add to this the fact that Xsan wants the MDCs to be on the latest OS being used on the SAN, and I REALLY need at least 1 new Xserve. Mail has waited this long… though, I think there is a big desire to use CalDAV this time around. So… money? 

My latest idea was to try to split up the cost. Maybe buy the FC cards, and extra HDs this fiscal year, then next year we buy the servers. Or maybe just buy one server this year, and another next. I really want to get this going. 

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