• Mac OS X Server

    Programatically Manage DNS In macOS Server

    DNS is DNS. And named is named. Except in macOS Server. Sometimes. The configuration files for the DNS services in macOS 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. The current version of BIND is BIND 9.9.7-P3 (Extended Support Version). This has been the case for a number of macOS Server versions, and can easily be located by doing a cat of the /Library/Server/named/.version file.  Traditionally, you would edit this configuration data by simply editing the configuration files, and that’s absolutely still…

  • SQL

    SQL and Date Functions

    SQL has some really great features for managing dates. Given that dates are a very common thing to store in databases, that’s a pretty logical thing to get to a good, mature point. But the most challenging aspect of working with date and time in SQL is formatting. There are lots of different ways to format dates around the world, and even different structures (e.g. epoch) that are often complicated by adding time to records. But, you need to do things in a consistent fashion with how SQL expects them, if you’ll be using built in functions to manage dates. Dates can be stored in a variety of formats, which…