Mac OS X server learning curve: as mentioned before, the 10.4 product is much more complex than the earlier versions I had used. So I've been RTFMing and trying out the features. My goal is have a home LAN where everyone's home directory is on a server, so you can sit at any Mac and voila, all your mail and bookmarks et al. just follow you around.

I could not seem to get OS X server to make home directories on the server for some reason. I followed the manual carefully, but the server failed every time to write out the normal Mac home folder structure, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why.

Finally I got into the terminal and began poking around on the command line. While looking at some other stuff on the LAN, I noticed that there was an error in the LAN's DNS record. One computer, penguin, had an incorrect A record. As it would happen, penguin was the hostname for the OS X server. Apparently, when the server tries to write the directory, it first looks it up in DNS, even though the directory in question is on the server's local file system.

So DNS failure meant no writing of home directories, and no error message (that I could easily find, anyway - there's probably something in some log somewhere). So now I'm able to do network log-ins... next trick will be migrating local home directories to the server...

Comments 7:37:33 AM    

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