The world’s most secret blog?
Posted on September 29, 2006
Filed Under All, Technology, Gulker labs |
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…
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[…] All the machines on the LAN point to our LAN’s twin DNS servers (2 Mac Minis) which resolve local lookups, and forward request to Comcast for addresses not on the private network or in the servers’ caches. Forwarding is now working correctly, and the presence of lightly-loaded DNS on the gigabit LAN makes for very snappy response for local or cached addresses. So, now we can begin streamlining the LAN, and moving services onto more compact (and powerful) hardware (e.g. the Core Duo Mini). Our much-liked (and very reliable) G4 Cube and our very nice 64-bit AMD-based Linux machine may be retired and/or reassigned. A couple of new experiments that were in back-of-napkin or prototype stage can now proceed. This should be fun… […]
[…] It’s Sunday morning, and a pleasant day stretches ahead. I’ve got a bunch of projects planned: some writing, a much-needed cleanup of the ‘World HQ’ and moving my secret blog to a public URL. Michael Matze, our family counselor who has helped me through past difficulties, has encouraged me to work through current trials by writing about them, including commissioning an essay. […]
Good news, very nice