• Ubuntu,  Unix

    Setting up DNS Services on Ubuntu

    On Sunday, I mentioned making your forward and reverse DNS entries match up. But I didn’t really discuss what to do if they don’t. For those readers moving into Ubuntu from Mac OS X Server, you’ll note that at installation time, if the hostname doesn’t match the A record and PTR for your server then it will install DNS and make them match up. The reason for this is that host names are a critical aspect in how many of the network services that modern services run. If you don’t have DNS or if you want to fire up DNS in the same manner that Mac OS X Server does…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Basic Git Usage

    Previously we looked at installing Git on Mac OS X. Now let’s take a look at using it. The first step is to add a new local git repository that looks to a remote repository. In the following example I’m going to add a local repository called custom-safari based on the git repository at packages/custom-safari on git.krypted.com. git remote add custom-safari git://https://krypted.com//packages/custom-safari.git Next make sure you’re using the latest from the repository: git pull Then checkout from the master git branch: git checkout -b custom-safari/master Now pull the files you’ve checked out: git pull custom-safari master Now you can do your work. Edit the files, wok on them and when…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Unix

    Replica Trees & Tuning Open Directory

    You have a fairly large Open Directory environment and you go to add the 33rd replica but you get a funny error that dserr doesn’t have listed. The reason is likely that a single Open Directory Master can only have 32 replicas. However, you can have 32 replicas on each replica (thus having a replica tree), ergo allowing for a total of 1,024 replicas and a master. So rather than bind that 33rd replica to a master, move to a replica tree model, trying to offload replicas in as geographically friendly a fashion as possible (thus reducing slap traffic on your WAN links) by repositioning replicas per site. Similar to…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment

    DeployStudio: Creating a New Master Image

    Once you have been using DeployStudio for a time, you’ll invariably end up creating a new master image.  This is a hot topic this summer, given that Apple will be releasing Mac OS X 10.6 later this year and many people integrating DeployStudio want to make sure that they can manage the solution themselves during the subsequent updates.  Provided you have been leveraging all of the best in package based imaging this might be a relatively small file, or if you are using a monolithic image for distribution it might be a fairly large file.  Either way, DeployStudio makes it fairly straight forward to create a new master image.  To…