Tag Archives: dns

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Nope! I’ve had it. For real this time.

Mac OS 10.4 Server worked fine. Mac OS 10.5 Server was a disaster. Mac OS 10.6 Server was only crashing and breaking every 6-9 months. Mac OS 10.7 Server was a complete screwup. Mac OS 10.8 Server is better but any serious networking is a no go!

 The fail!

DNS Server on Mountain Lion does *not* work. I’m not gonna wait for 10.8.1. It’s been rubbish since Lion came out last year. But it just got worse. It’s slow, unresponsive and sends things to the wrong IP’s. Generally DNS is now more of a hinderance than useful tool. Combining that with the glaring omission of DHCP in the core services, Apple finally managed to push me away from a product because it sucks so bad.

In 10.7 a very very big gripe was Access Control Lists conflicting on all kinds of things. Mountain Lion makes this a tad bit worse. The conflicting ACL’s are still there and now require me to give “everyone” read-only access even though the users are already in the ACL. This is a major security flaw if you ask me. Also FTP can only share one path not unlike in Snow Leopard (10.6) Where i could allow access to /Storage *and* /Library/WebServer/Sites/. It’s one or the other now. Terrible!

Not to mention the terrible idea of lock files and restricted access on every /Library and /System folder. Dammit Apple, I can take care of my own computer!

The road to victory

I’m going to phase out Mac OS Server for several things and be done with it. Ubuntu Server 12.04 seems really reliable and appealing and with it’s large community should be fairly easy to set up too. Plus I already have a Ubuntu jacket and some experience with Ubuntu Desktop.

In order to bring some order into the resulted chaos of upgrading my servers to 10.8 I’ve ordered a bunch of parts and am gonna build a PC server.

It’s small, cheap and has great reviews and good performance for small networks like mine. Many use them as Home Theater PC’s so certainly Network Services will perform even better on it!

I’ve ordered:

1x Antek ISK-300 mITX case
1x Asus AT5NM10T-I, Atom D525, 2xDDR3, mITX

I have suitable ram lying around and a bunch of harddisks that are new. And with that for just under 250 euros (including the already owned harddisk and ram) I have a “Mac Mini Grade” tiny PC.

This machine will be taking care of DHCP, DNS and when it’s all settled in and working I plan on moving some other things to it as well, VPN and perhaps even my File sharing.

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That’s right. For some reason Mac OS DNS Server screwed up the named.conf and cleared it out. I just added a new Alias… Can’t be that hard, right?

Anyway, removing the named.conf and re-creating all DNS entries worked and it seems back online now. Also i had to re-set all other settings for the DNS which were kindly screwed up too. Go Apple Go! Awesome products!

[update]

While it seemingly was fixed with a new records table. It wasn’t none of the clients could ping one another on the domain name. The server itself lost track of the domain too. Which made Open Directory crash. And DHCP. And some other things.

Repairing efforts have been fruitless, as usual. Googling the issues turned up nothing but other frustrated users. So fuck it. Back to Snow Leopard server. A clean install… Now where did I put that serial code :( .

[update 2]

I’ve now reinstalled the server with Snow Leopard. Damn that is fast compared to Lion. I can’t even go grab a drink before loading the settings in server admin finish loading. It’s amazing. Things actually respond within a few seconds! It should be the other way around really. Installing a newer system and get the feeling its infinitely better, faster and more awesome. Now I’m really sad that I cannot downgrade the other server to Snow Leopard as well. :(

It makes me wonder how superbly faster my iMac and laptop will be if i could install Snow Leopard on it…

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Over the past days i migrated my websites to another webhost. Somewhere today or tomorrow, depending on when the DNS servers will be updated, meandmymac.net as well as some other domains of me are being moved to a new webhost. Service could be was interrupted for a few days.

Another more pressing impact will be that the forum will no longer be available at the forum.at.meandmymac.net Since a dot in the subdomain is apparently evil :) .

The new address will simply by meandmymac.net/forum/ Plugins will be updated accordingly and i’ll try to set up some redirect from the old address.

Some posts on the forum might be lost in the transition. I expect not too much trouble though as everything is prepared and should go smoothly.

As an update, the transition took ages because something kept going wrong at the chosen webhost. I have since solved the issue by moving to yet another webhost. This seemed the fastest solution!

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Hah! And you should get one too!

Get yours here: https://www.opendns.com/community/merch/!

Don’t know about openDNS yet? It’s a free DNS service trying to make the internet work better. I use their servers for my home internet connection exclusively, apart from my own internal DNS server. I think they’re doing a great job since name resolving goes lighting fast.

What is DNS? It means Dynamic Name Server. Which basically is a service translating the web site addresses we type in computer readable terms. If the server translation is set up properly things go faster and are more secure.