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I have been tinkering with a new Mac Mini Server recently installed at our studio. While I consider myself tech savvy, I don't pretend to be an expert on such subjects as DNS configurations, advanced firewalls, VPN and NAT. So while trying to setup the server as a gateway between the web and our office, it was not entirely unexpected that I would leave myself stranded at the bottom of a very deep hole, dug using my own ignorance. There was no way out so I had little alternative but to roll back to the last Time Machine backup taken before my ill advised networking adventure. 

Apple proudly sings the virtues of using Time Machine as a backup solution for Mac OS X Server 10.6. However, while I had no problem restoring the system, I was left with some unexpected issues once the server was rebooted. Most services worked as advertised but upon launching the company wiki and blogs within Safari, I was presented with a '503 error' page. 

After nearly 4 hours of scouring support forums, knowledge bases and mailing lists I finally got the bottom of the issue. Time Machine automatically skips over caches and log files when creating a backup. Usually this is no problem but it seems that the 'teams' service that powers the wiki and blogs feature in Mac OS X Server requires the presence of its log file to operate correctly. This discovery finally led me to a knowledge base article on Apple.com that gives step by step instructions on recreating the necessary files and restoring the correct permissions to the wiki directory. 

By following the instructions below I was able to restore wiki functionality...

To restore the Web service (server):

1. Open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities).
2. Execute these commands, each on its own line, followed by Return. Note: When using these commands you will be prompted for an administrator's password.
   
   sudo mkdir /var/log
   sudo mkdir /var/log/apache2
   
   
3. To restore the Wiki service (server), run the following commands in addition to those above:
   
   sudo mkdir /Library/Logs/wikid
   sudo chown _teamsserver:_teamsserver /Library/Logs/wikid
   

After running these commands restart your server.