Push Mail to iPhone working with Lion Server?

Yes it is working finally!

Just make sure you have the push notification certificate from apple and it should work.

;-)

No it doesn't work. Push mail activated on the lion server and on the iPhone but nothing is pushed at all I have to manually check for emails to receive them.

Lion Server's documentation states you must be running iOS 5 for push notifications to work

However, people, do not post "Yes it does" and leave it at that. If you indeed got it to work, do the rest of us a favor and explain how you did because I sure can't get it to work.

You cannot configure IOS to use PUSH for IMAP and or POP email. Never have been able to. One will need to wait for a change to IOS before you can expect to PUSH to work.

Here's to wishful thinking Tim. Before I reformatted and put SLS back on my mail server I was seeing push notifications in my logs to a UDID on one of my developer iPhones running iOS 5 B3. I just can't seem to get the certificate onto my iPhone because I am having problems getting the device to register with the Profile Manager.

Thoughts?

Hello Tim

Good to see a familiar face!

Seems like those who are posting appear to be not only new to Lion Server but OS X Server in general? Same old same old I guess?

Tony

The way PUSH works on Lion differs from the of SLS. You are right in what you were seeing. I'm unable to offer any advice on iOS beta products here.

Hi Tony.... good to see you. Bit shocked on how many users are upgrading already.... Guess I better think about shutting 10.4 servers down soon!

Tim

I agree Tim - I saw more APNS certificate activity on Lion than XMPP on SLS.

I am having far more problems with the web hosting on Lion than mail/Push to iPhones. Luckily, most of the companies IT departments I manage/develop for are now used to the lack of push to iPhone so this is not a real priority for me yet, but it did look promising.

But, since I have your ear for a moment, have you developed a serious disdain for web hosting under Lion like I have?

Hello Tim

I know what you mean!! Most of the guys new to Server appear to be too fearless IMO! I'm like you as I prefer to take the belt and braces approach. Have a fallback position, plenty of backups and test everything first.

You've done better than I in keeping 10.4 going for as long as you have. The last 10.4 Server I saw was about 18 months ago! Seems strange now as it does not seem that long ago when it was new and everyone was complaining about how bad it was compared with 10.3!

Interesting times ahead!

Tony

I don't use it (other than for some friends) for web hosting. I have a good number of email servers and iChat (jabber servers) and also use if for other messaging services. For that it works fine and you don't needs sys admin guru's once to keep it running - once it's running. iCAL is also a lot better in Lion and as is the way they deploy jabber services and you see the components for better intergration with mobile devices. Sadly - they have removed a lot of stuff from the GUI - personally, I would have prefereed that they just fixed it.

Not sure where Apple are taking the Server product. Home Based services I suspect.

I have quite a few SLS sitting on XServes deployed in my own company of 41 employees for most of SLS's services. I use web hosting quite a bit and although the GUI wasn't the best, it was at least usable. In Lion, Server Admin has been dumbed down to run a few basic services, such as DNS and OD. Web is now run in that atrocious thing called Server App. (I just spit up a little in my mouth saying Server App...)

You can't handle multihoming, redirects, aliases, WebDAV or anything of the like. If you want any of these, it's to the command line you go. And that is a battle in and of itself because whatever you do by hand, Lion Server will erase when you refresh the web server.

I must say that most of the services got an well deserved boost. iCal and AddressBook work very well under Lion even to iOS devices. I think the mail portion of it was trying to push out to iOS but I couldn't get the device to enroll with the profile manager, but I suspect that was my own error.

I agree whole heartedly that they may have taken a few steps ahead with iCal and Addressbook and a few others, but they took monumental steps backward in many such as Web and WebDAV.

With all due respect, can we please stick to the subject ? Many thanks.

I have push email working on Lion Server with iOS version 4.3.5 and for that matter it was working with 4.3.4. For some reason, Calender and Contact are not pushing but fetch instead. I suspect that will change when iOS 5 is released.

My first attempt at getting it to work failed because my device (iPhone) did not trust the MDM server's SSL certificate (because of the root CA that issued it). I also had other issues so I decided on starting over. My second attempt after a time machine restore and reinstall of Lion Server, I changed the order of configuration of services. OD (Open Directory) was configured first, which was done automatically via Profile Manager. Enabling device management will prompt for the install/configuration of OD. Then before enabling device management (after the OD configuration completed, I configured the rest of the services (mail, iCal, etc.) and turned them on. Lastly, I went back to Profile Manager and enabled Device Management. During the setup process, Server app asked if I wanted to enable push notifications and I did so. I then went to https://host.myserver.com/mydevices/, authenticated and installed the trust profle first, then enrollment profile. MDM works fine as well as push notifications. Not a single issue since.

Regards,

-SD

I finally did a clean install and guess what? It works! The previous install was over SLS and I think a bit messy.

I did not set up and run Profile Manager nor OD and configured the host as a local host (i.e. mymachine.local).

I don't really know what made it work but I did something I didn't I the previous installation (because I missed this option). I installed Server Admin Tools, ran Server Admin and in the "settings" tab chose "mymachine.local" as the push notification server.

Hope this will help.