If you don’t have a HostName set on your computer then Open Directory backups are likely to fail using Time Machine. How did you promote to an Open Directory Master if you don’t have functional backups you may ask? Let’s not worry about that for now. Instead, let’s turn our attention to /var/backups. You see, if you enable Time Machine on an OS X Server, you’ll get a ServerBackup_OpenDirectoryMaster.sparseimage in that folder, which contains your Open Directory backups and gets picked up by our pal Time Machine. You can manually run a backup using the opendirectorybackup script at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/libexec/server_backup/opendirectorybackup. This could be automated, using expect to send a password, but…
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Change the IP/Host Name on ESX iSCSI Initiators
Setting up iSCSI to work with ESX is usually a pretty straight forward affair. But like with many things, change can be hard. But sometimes things get moved to different subnets or storage gets replaced. To configure a vSphere client to connect, select a virtual machine and then click on it and click on the Configuration tab. From there, click on Storage Adapters using the Hardware panel. From the Hardware Panel, click on an initiator and then click on Properties and then click on Configure. Then provide the new name or IP. Make sure that the name is unique and then if needed provide an iSCSI alias. Then change the IP settings…
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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…
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Installing Ubuntu 10 in Fusion
I’ve done a number of articles on using Ubuntu 10 as a server recently, but haven’t actually looked at doing the base installation of an Ubuntu 10 host. In this example, I’ll look at using Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop. In many of the previous examples I’ve been looking at Ubuntu 10.10 Server; the reason I’m using 10.04 Desktop here is because I believe there is a smaller learning curve and that inherently Mac OS X Systems Administrators who might be following this thread actually like a GUI. There are a number of aspects of this type of setup that are simply not GUI oriented; however, the base OS can easily be,…
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DeployStudio: Rename a Volume with Host Name
DeployStudio has the ability to rename volumes as part of a standard workflow. These are typically set to something like “Macintosh HD” (the default) or “Computer Lab” or something like that. But what if you wanted to name the volume something unique to a given computer, which makes it easier to keep track with what you are doing across a number of servers? You could create a workflow for each computer and change the hard drive name for each to something unique; but that would be tedious and pollute your list of workflows, likely resulting in accidentally running the wrong workflow at times. Instead, you could look at a really…
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hostname
OK, so this one is pretty easy. You can use the hostname command to return back the name of your computer. There’s also a nifty little s flag to remove any domain naming from the return string.