Lost Wiki calendars after upgrade to 10.6.4

DurocShark wrote:
This happened to us too. Maybe it's Apple's way of saying to go to Exchange? I hope not, but that's what'll happen here if I can't get this solved. 😟

It's not that anyone intended to break the unsupported group calendaring hack, it's that this is not a tested or supported configuration. Relying on such behavior means that you are at risk, in a similar way that an application developer would be at risk by using private API - it may change or disappear at any time. Try not to read too much into this; there are no coded messages at play here. The only message is: use of unsupported techniques occurs at your own risk. The fact that it worked until 10.6.4 should be considered 'luck'.

I am sorry for the inconvenience, though. There's not much I can do to help, other than to confirm that this is not expected to work, which may save some people some hair-pulling; mainly I've posted here in hopes of encouraging folks to not do unsupported things, because of the associated risk.

-dre

It was supported in 10.5. It was pulled in 10.6. The "de facto" workaround was the only to continue with the features that existed in a previous version.

I'm frustrated because I spent a lot of time getting it working in Leopard, then a bunch more time getting it working in Snow, and now it no longer works. Luckily we didn't push 10.6.4 to everybody before this was discovered. We're in the middle of prepping the teacher and student machines, and it would have been a nightmare to try to explain to the teachers that the web interface is the only way to work.

DurocShark wrote:
It was supported in 10.5. It was pulled in 10.6. The "de facto" workaround was the only to continue with the features that existed in a previous version.

I'm frustrated because I spent a lot of time getting it working in Leopard, then a bunch more time getting it working in Snow, and now it no longer works. Luckily we didn't push 10.6.4 to everybody before this was discovered. We're in the middle of prepping the teacher and student machines, and it would have been a nightmare to try to explain to the teachers that the web interface is the only way to work.

Exactly. Further it wasn't like folks were hacking anything on the server to get it to work. It used the published alternate url for the calendar. What seems like more of a hack is to just get basic functionality working like getting an individual users CalDAV account to accept invitations from outside users. Good luck with that. Or getting push notification working on calendars without it completely messing up the availability of your users on the iChat jabber service. I have to say I am extremely disappointed.

the only problem is the new ical-client (4.0.3)
our ›old‹ ical on 10.5.8. (3.0.8) has no problem with
the updated server.

there would be no problem if ical
wouldn't change from
/principals/wikis/ groupname/
to
/principals/ _uids_/ d1177f03-96dc-5e03-9715-fdf29a1bXXXXX/
after restart.

I agree... Took me some time to get this working in 10.6.3. But it worked and everyone was happy. This was one of the reasons going for the mini server, the group calendar thing. Now they ruined it... Sure not supported but if so dont advertise about it.

Anyone knows if any third party client still works?

In one of the other threads on this subject it was mentioned that Sunbird still works. I haven't tried it yet.

Hi!

I think this is a bug of 10.6.4. I tried this more than 3 time on more than two servers and it's the same result.
But, normally Apple doesn't recommend this feature of using the Group Calendar in iCal Client Software.
But it's not nice to have a bugged workaround for a feature everybody needs.

WiMi from Germany

Pohhh Thats bad news.
Sorry for my bad english but this is a key feature if you use group calendar and wiki in small and mid range business. i do not know why this is not included in snow leopard when you know that this is a key feature. My customers and me are not very happy with this post.

By the way. A lot of Apple Trainees telling you how to implement that group calendaring in snow leopard. i am not sure if they are happy now 😉

PLEASE APPLE BRING GROUP CALENDARING BACK.

Thanks for all your post. But i do not know now how to sell a mac server instead of a SBS from Microsoft. I will check the "group calendaring" with delegation or i will setup a new "group user" but this really makes me unhappy. Maybe someone else finds a solution for that.

Thanks to all and have a nice weekend..
Mike

Andre: You mention that Group Calendaring was not supported, yet in OSX 10.5.x Server it was supported and documented. The fact that 10.6.x server changed to group wiki calendars from direct group calendars and removed documentation from how to use them did not negate the fact that this was fully supported from 10.5 on. The fact is that enterprise environments that used the feature in 10.5.x and continued to use the broken Wiki version in 10.6.x are now suddenly, two to three years after starting to use this feature, suddenly faced with it not working on client systems.

As a system admin that has been installing OSX systems and purchasing Apple hardware for the past five years, this is simply not an acceptable answer. This is a critical functionality for our work environment, and the breaking of this feature, documented or undocumented in 10.6.x, is a significant disruption to our business.

Oh, and "undocumented" really doesn't mean anything with Apple. The documentation has holes big enough to drive a truck through for "supported" functionality. So doing something "undocumented" doesn't mean much to me, and isn't out of the ordinary.

And given that under 10.5 this feature was documented and supported, it can be reasonably assumed that removing documentation for it did not mean it became unsupported, given Apple's past undocumented features that were fully supported.

Random Chaos wrote:
Andre: You mention that Group Calendaring was not supported, yet in OSX 10.5.x Server it was supported and documented.

You are correct (well, I'll take your word for the documentation part... I can't seem to find the 10.5 PDFs). Part of the confusion (for me, at least) is that the phrase 'group calendaring' is really quite overloaded, and means different things to different people. But you are right that we did have a supported group calendaring feature in 10.5 that functioned in a useful way for customers. When I think of 'group calendaring', I think of 'shared calendars' in the fashion of e.g. google calendar, or what we currently have in our trunk code, where more than one user may have read / write access - without requiring delegation setup. So I apologize for my incorrect statement.

... and there is some good news. Turns out there is a pretty simple server-side change that brings back the group wiki calendar usage pattern that folks have been using until 10.6.4. However, you would have to manually apply this change to your calendar server code, which means this is... unsupported, at present. If you want to try this, be sure to make a backup of the file before you edit it. The diff is shown here:

http://trac.calendarserver.org/changeset/5775/CalendarServer/branches/release/Ca lendarServer-2.5-dev

The change is so small, you probably wouldn't even need to worry about patching in the traditional sense, but rather just crack open /usr/share/caldavd/lib/python/twistedcaldav/directory/principal.py in a text editor, change the line shown, and change its location (moved below those two lines shown between the red and green blocks).

To clarify, the changed portion (around line 530) of the old / existing version of principal.py would look like:

assert record is not None, "Principal must have a directory record"

url = joinURL(parent.principalCollectionURL(), record.guid) + slash

self.record = record
self.parent = parent
self._url = url

and the 'patched' version would look like:

assert record is not None, "Principal must have a directory record"

self.record = record
self.parent = parent

url = joinURL(parent.principalCollectionURL(), self.principalUID()) + slash
self._url = url

To answer the question before it's asked, I can't comment on the possibility of inclusion of this change in future releases of iCal Server.

Cheers,
-dre

DurocShark wrote:
Oh, and "undocumented" really doesn't mean anything with Apple. The documentation has holes big enough to drive a truck through for "supported" functionality. So doing something "undocumented" doesn't mean much to me, and isn't out of the ordinary.

Please file documentation bugs whenever this is the case.

-dre

Andre,

I will for sure try this fix. Thank you!

In trying to find a way for people to use a group calendar, I came up with the following process. I made a resource called departmentcalendar using the iCal Server Utility. I then found the following link http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3897 and used the calendarserver manageprincipals to make members of a group read/write delegates for that resource calendar. I was able to connect to the resource calendar fine using iCal and create events.

My question is, if we make the code change you suggested above, would it be better (or possible using the calendarserver manageprincipals utility) to make people delegates of the wiki calendar?

Thanks

Message was edited by: Mr Beardsley

The fixed worked, and now iCal does not change the URL to the _uid_/guid version. If you make the change you do need to stop and restart your iCal service and then open up the iCal client and re-enter the Server path: for people that couldn't connect.

Andre,

I am curious though why originally the wiki calendars didn't get a proper principals/ _uid_/guid URL that pointed to a valid calendar location?