DNS (really) solved: next steps toward the new LAN

If you’ve been following my struggles with updating our our LAN, you’ll know that DNS has been an issue. Earlier we had found a nifty product called DNS Enabler to turn on and configure the BIND servers lurking under Mac OS X’s hood, but there were some problems leading to slow browser page loads. [...]

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 [...]

The LAN overhaul begins

With the Mini finally upgraded, we can get down to the fun part, architecting the new LAN. First stop will be to learn a bit more about DNS behavior, and then doing the back-of-envelope diagrams that serve as a starting point. The half-terabyte array, an SMB share, is proving to be problematic on our Mac [...]

The Mini, finally sees all 2 GB of its new RAM

It was a struggle, and the Mini almost didn’t make it through the process, but the Intel Mini now sees al 2 GB of its new Techworks RAM from Other World Computing. The problem may not have been bad RAM: the problem may well have been a very small metal tab on the retaining clip [...]

The half-terabyte array, re-thought

With 5 months under our belt using the half-terabyte array, we are re-thinking completing the project by adding 2 more 250 GB NAS drives. These SMB shares (aka CIFS as the Mac prefers to ID them) have a way of dropping off the network. Often, they can’t be remounted without restarting them (this takes me [...]

Long, full day

After a week on the road, there was lots awaiting me in the inbox, voice mail et al. upon return to work. Today was full, if I may make that point. I’m hoping to veg a bit this PM, so we’ll turn our full attention to the gulker.com LAN project.
Which subject has its own [...]

Mini computer, maximum frustration

So step 1 on the migrate LAN-to-2-minis project was to upgrade the Intel Core Duo to 2 GB. Apple’s RAM prices were high compared to the market when I bought my original Core Duo, and the local Apple Store wanted an additional $100 to upgrade a Mini while I waited, on top of the [...]

DNS solved

DNS Enabler worked as advertised on our Intel Mac Mini, so I went back to the G4 Mac Mini, and on the 3rd try, it worked (I suspect user error caused the initial failure… RTFM). So I have to move the Intel Mini onto the wired LAN, figure out if I need to route the [...]

The joy of hacking DNS

Last night we bought Cutedge System’s DNS Enabler, and went to work setting up DNS on our 2 Mac Minis, as the first step in migrating all of gulker.com’s LAN services to the Minis. DNS Enabler gives you a way to configure the DNS without having to master the arcane notation of BIND’s config files [...]

Virtual gulker.com on a Mini or two

Robert Carleton’s story about moving a rack full of older Celeron-based servers to a Mac Mini, using Parallels VM software to host the BSD images of his servers, got me thinking. Robert’s pages, served from a BSD image of his old rack mount servers hosted on a Mac Mini now on his desktop, pop [...]

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