Apple recently announced the end of the Apple Xserve. The data center is a funny thing, and being such rack space is critical to most who spend a lot of time there. Many of the previous Xserve customers will continue to buy Mac Pro’s and use them in racks as tall Xserves. Others will purchase Mac Mini’s and use them for certain situations. But many will move on to using the same iron in the data center that they use for everything else, finding a way to duplicate or replace the functionality that was previously in the Xserve with something else. Server Admin is not going to run on Linux.…
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DHCP Leases Expanded
DHCP provides IP addresses to clients. DHCP is critical to a number of Mac OS X Server technologies, most notably with NetBoot. In doing so, communications are comprised of 4 steps: Discovery, Offer, Acceptance, and Acknowledgment. In the Discovery step, a computer that needs an IP address sends a broadcast request to the environment. These typically remain local, although most routers will allow for configuring the gateway in such a way that UDP traffic is forwarded on to other subnets. The request also includes all of the options that the client will need, with options being anything beyond an IP address, each potential option with a numerical identifier per this…
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Mac OS X Server: DHCP and Open Directory
You can push out Open Directory bindings through DHCP. This means that if anything happens with your DHCP server that your users might not be able to log in. This is also not a trusted bind, or a bind where your computer records are generated on the server. If you take issue to either of these then you likely want to check out pushing out Open Directory bindings using the dsconfigldap command through, let’s say, Apple Remote Desktop.