The world’s most secret blog?

Our Mac OS X 10.4 Server, which has been turned off for a couple of months, has just been booted. Not sure exactly what, if anything we’ll be doing with this machine, but we’re going to give it another hard look.

Earlier we had thought our inexpensive half-terabyte array and some lightweight software and a couple of Mac Minis would take over our LAN chores and experimental work. But, as we’ve chronicled, the NAS SMB shares are not particularly stable on our Mac LAN, and copying large directories (e.g., the contents of all our old hard drives) is a minor nightmare: SMB doesn’t support the same character set as Mac HFS, so the copy process stops dozens (or hundreds) of times during a large transfer when a filename contains an ‘illegal’ character.

The first thing OS X Server did was prompt to be upgraded, to OS X Server 10.4.8 (which patch seems to have appeared just today) and QuickTime 7.0.1 – 250.8 MB of updates (rather reminds one of Windows XP). After a restart, we fired up the admin program.

DNS admin still appears to be broken: it doesn’t know what version of BIND we’re running, or when it started (even though the other admins know this info). It also doesn’t show any zones, even though the log file shows the zones being loaded without error, and the DNS works when accessed from the LAN. At issue, I think, is that I placed DNS host and config files in BIND’s directories before booting (the normal way that BIND is configured), and OS X Server Admin won’t display them.

It apparently shows zones et al. only if you configure via OS X Server Admin program. But I have the files already from my old Linux server, so why re-enter the data host by host? I’ve noticed grumbling about DNS in OS X Server on Apple’s and other user forums – I can’t see any reason Server Admin doesn’t support a standard technology in its BSD core.

Just for fun, we did fire up the built-in blogging server (seen above) and have created the world’s most secret (and, possibly, pointless) blog. No one can see it but me… and I wrote it. Some may think it’s perfect… I can vainly peruse my thoughts, without inflicting them on the ‘net. Heh. This might be a good place to keep a diary, come to think of it.

Anyway, the AFP performance, on our gigabit network, is snappy, and there are no file-system character mismatch problems. I may be able to get MySQL and PHP going, among other things, giving me a staging server to try out things before posting them on the ‘real’ gulker.com. Stay tuned: in learning OS X Server we clearly have a major way to tune out of other, more distressing pursuits…