Chapter 5 of my next book is now available from TidBits.com for members at http://tidbits.com/article/14840. While much of the chapter ended up on the cutting room floor, it’s worth mentioning that it is tailored to the audience. I think I learned a valuable lesson here, in reviewing too much vs. too little vs. just enough. Thanks again to Adam and Tanya for their infinite patience and wisdom!
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- Active Directory, cloud, Consulting, iPhone, Kerio, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment, Microsoft Exchange Server, Network Infrastructure, Windows Server
Dig TTL While Preparing For A Migration
Any time doing a migration of data from one IP to another where that data has a DNS record that points users towards the data, we need to keep the amount of time it takes to repoint the record to a minimum. To see the TTL of a given record, let’s run dig using +trace, +nocmd to turn off showing the version and query options, +noall to turn off display flags, +answer to still show the answer section of my reponse and most importantly for these purposes +ttlid to toggle showing the TTL on. Here, we’ll use these to lookup the TTL for the https://krypted.com/ A record: dig +trace +nocmd…
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Setup the DNS Service in OS X Mavericks Server
Under the hood, OS X Server has a number of substantial changes; however, at first the Server app (Server 3) appears to have had very few changes. The changes in the Server app were far more substantial in the Mountain Lion version of OS X Server. All of the options from Mountain Lion are still there and using the new command line interface for managing the service, there are far more options than ever before. The DNS service in OS X Server, as with previous versions, is based on bind 9 (BIND 9.9.2-P2 to be exact). This is very much compatible with practically every DNS server in the world, including…
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Managing DNS Services From the Command Line in Mavericks Server
DNS is DNS. And named is named. Except in OS X Server. The configuration files for the DNS services in OS X Server are stored in /Library/Server/named. This represents a faux root of named configuration data, similar to how that configuration data is stored in /var/named on most other platforms. Having the data in /Library/Server/ makes it more portable across systems. Traditionally, you would edit this configuration data by simply editing the configuration files, and that’s absolutely still an option. In Mavericks Server (Server 3), a new command is available at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DNSManager.framework called dnsconfig. The dnsconfig command appears simple at first. However, the options available are actually far more complicated…
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16 Child Proofing iPad and iPod Touch Tips For Parents
Recently I woke up and my daughter was sitting on me watching something on the iPad. As I woke ever so slightly I realized that she was watching Transformers the movie on Netflix. I’m not typically a helicopter dad, hovering over her every move, but I did realize amidst the explosions that ya’, I might want to take some of the things I learned writing the book on locking these things down and put a few very basic measures in place to keep her from seeing something she shouldn’t. After all, she’s gotten about as good at navigating around the thing as I am (and these days she’s getting pretty…
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Managing DNS In Windows Server 2012
Previously, I covered installing the DNS role in Windows Server 2012. Once installed, managing the role is very similar to how management was done in Windows Server 2003 through 2008 R2. With the exception of how you access the tools. DNS is one of the most important services in Windows Servers, as with most other platforms. So it’s important to configure DNS. To get into the DNS Manager in 2012 Server, first open Server Manager (you might get sick of using this tool in Server 2012, similar to how my Mac Server brethren have gotten tired of it in Lion and Mountain Lion Servers. Then from Server Manager click on…
- Active Directory, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Network Infrastructure, Ubuntu, Unix, VMware, Windows Server, Windows XP, Xsan
List All DNS Records For A Domain
Sometimes you want to move a domain but you don’t have a copy of the zone file in order to recreate records. The easy way to do this is to grab a zone transfer. To do so, dig is your friend: dig -tAXFR mycompany.com Sometimes though (and actually more often than not) a zone transfer is disabled. In that case you’ll need to dig the domain a bit differently. I like to use +nocmd, query for any and list the results (+answer): dig +nocmd https://krypted.com/ any +answer Which results in the following: ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 39183 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1,…
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Managing DNS Using Mac OS X Mountain Lion Server
The most impactful aspect of the changes in OS X Mountain Lion Server at first appears to be the fact that DNS looks totally different in the Server app than it did in Server Admin. For starters, most of the options are gone from the graphical interface and it looks a lot less complicated, meaning that there are indeed fewer options. However, all of the options previously available are still there. And, the service behaves exactly as it did before, down to the automatically created host name when a server is configured and doesn’t have correctly configured forward and reverse DNS records that match the host name of the computer.…
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Changes in Mountain Lion Server
Mountain Lion Server is now available on the OS X App Store and as with the last few updates there are some things missing that you might be expecting and depending on. First up, three major services are gone: Podcast Producer, RADIUS and dhcp. You can still do dhcp as you always did with OS X client as those features work on OS X Server, but the more granular controls available in OS X Server are now gone. The biggest impact of dhcp is probably in testing NetBoot services when there are network issues and you need to prove to network admins that it’s the network and not your server……
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MacTech InDepth In New York
I have been added as a speaker at MacTech InDepth in New York. If you haven’t signed up yet, and you work with Mac OS X Server then you should really check out the sessions that have been planned: The Elephant in the Room: The New Lion OS X is out, now what? There are a lot of differences to contend with between Lion and Snow Leopard. Now with the new Mountain Lion update, what changes can we expect to see? We discuss the differences in advanced services, GUI simplicity, and Apache management GUI’s. We help you understand the updates in the new OS and make the transition easier. We…