Resolved How to admin my Snow Leopard Server with my Lion Mac?

[Blindside]

Following situation:

We have a Mac Mini Server in our Lab with Snow Leopard Server. It is locked in a cabinet, it is thus not handy to make daily changes directly on the server.

I used the Server Admin tool on my Macbook Pro 10.6.x for daily tasks like creating Folder and assigning who is allowed to see them and who is not etc (this permission stuff for servers is what I need to do regularly).

Yesterday I upgraded my Macbook Pro to Lion, and apparently Lion deleted all the Server Admin Software. I am also not able to reinstall it from CD because it says that it can only be installed on snow Leopard.

So I downloaded the Lion Server tools, but apparently their functionality was changed significantly. Most important for my: In 'Server Admin' I am neither able to see and manipulate folders like I could before nor can I assign permissions to folders individually. In the Snow Leopard version I was presented with a Finder-like view under the 'Permissions' tab and was able to do all the things.
Now I am only presented with Services and their permissions, but not with the file system.
so right now I am forced to run a virtual machine just to use the old server admin software, which is a huge waste of ressources.

Does anyone have suggestions how to get back this finder-like view in server admin in order to manipulate folders and assign permissions?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Pressure]

You could SSH in and do all those things or just use Share Screen?

I easily manage our servers with the Share Screen option.

 

[Blindside]

That might be a solution.

But I need to access the server physically once to set up share screen, right? Or can I do that remotely? (I am quite a beginner regarding servers and happen to admin ours just by chance...)

 

[Pressure]

You don't have to access the server physically.

Just find it on your network tab and you should be presented with the option to use the Share Screen feature. You might get prompted to input account and password first.

It also means you can manage the server from anywhere, even outside of the company walls, should you ever need that.

 

[Blindside]

Thanks.
I just connected via Safari (vnc://'IP') and worked fine. The server is not connected to the Internet since we are only using it internally to share experimental data (I know, quite underwhelming usage).

However, my problem is now solved. Thank you!

 

[chrfr]

While I see that you've found a solution, I don't see a change in functionality from the 10.6 to 10.7 Admin tools in terms of what I can view in the AFP section of Server Admin.