I recently had occasion to do some Mac OS X DNS configuration. Primary DNS setup is pretty straightforward, but I always get stuck on the secondary DNS config, and this week I had the (not so) rare privilege of discovering I’d been doing it wrong all along. I thought I’d post some quickie instructions for [...]
So here’s the plan, as it stands right now. (Yes, I have a plan already! Yes, that was quick.) First, build an image that’s good for all workstations (laptops, staff machines, standard workstations, etc.) throughout the lab with: Base OS (Mac OS X Leopard 10.5) A DHCP network connection Apple applications Adobe applications Drag-and-drop applications [...]
So I’m sitting in my office, waiting for the Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard update to show up in my Software Update, and it just isn’t happening. And at some point I realize, “Hey, maybe it just hasn’t been downloaded to our Software Update Server yet.” Yes, we run our very own Software Update Server [...]
My big, fat, self-assigned new project — or, as I like to call it, the bug up my butt — is system roll-outs. That is, I realized at some point two things. One, I am managing way more computers than ever before, and way more than I realized; and two, the scope and variety of [...]
So there’s an incredibly annoying and puzzling behavior in Mac OS X with regards to duplicate computer names on the LAN. Most Mac Admins probably know what I’m talking about. Here’s the deal: Let’s say you have a Mac Pro on your home network named Spanky and it has an IP address of 192.168.1.25. Let’s [...]
I recently wondered aloud about the benefits of MacFUSE-supplied ssh access in a web development environment. A reader asked for a follow-up in the comments to that post, so I thought I’d just do a quickie today. After writing the article, I tried out MacFUSE and the sshfs extension to that bundle. This combo facilitates [...]
I’m not a web programmer by any means. But a component of the department I work in deals with the web from an artistic standpoint, and a subset of that group does, in fact, do programming. We have web programming classes. Recently, one of the teachers of one of those classes made the charge that [...]
Typically, when you set up a Mac client to bind to a Mac server using Directory Access, there is one lone entry in the Security settings that is checked by default, and that is the “Disable clear text passwords” setting. This seems like a prudent default, and I always leave it checked. I assume that [...]
It’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to post anything of any substance. This has a lot to do with the fact that I’ve been super busy relocating our department and participating in the gut renovation of our lab. This has been an immensely stressful process, but in the end I find that [...]
So today, after downgrading my master server to 10.4.7, I kept getting an error on my replica. So I decided to reset the replica by demoting it to a “Standalone” role, and then re-promoting it to the “Replica” role. But even after doing this, the error message persisted. The message was telling me to check [...]