Tag Archives: Home Office

New Computer Set Up

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Today I was looking at a new way to set up some monitors for my work computer. After we move to Eugene, Oregon my job should change a little. It looks like I will be doing some business consulting and some UX designing based on the outcomes of this business consulting. Then for “fun” I will also be working with an archive digitizing some linguistics texts and publishing a few items which have been sitting on my “To – Do” shelf. As I was considering this, I was thinking about my computer use habits and how much do I want to be in Eugene and indoors on my computer. Continue reading →

Home Transformation Project

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Finished the new office. – and put some new photos up in the living room just in time to move.

Router in Closet

Today I put my router in so that the Gigabit LAN network could fly...

Becky and I in the new office in November of 2011

Becky and I in the new office in November of 2011

We also set up a bunch of pictures on our wall...

We also set up a bunch of pictures on our wall… Just in time to move. Not exactly strait but close enough.

Chronicles of DNS & Sub-Domains on OSX Server

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The Intended Setup:

We want to be able to run the OSX provided Wiki, Calendar and Blog features of the WebService. In addition we want to also run Mercurial (http://mercurial.selenic.com/) and RefBase (http://www.refbase.net/).
We want to run:

  • OSX services at mephaa.xyz
  • Mercurial at: hg.mephaa.xyz
  • Refbase at: ref.mephaa.xyz

These sites are for our work group only, they need not be accessible to the outside world. But if in the process we can make our setup of such a nature that an invited guest could collaborate with us on our project and view our workgroups’s collaboration area that would be ok. We will be using the MacPorts version/method of running mercurial.
Aside: Since I originally started out to resolve this challenge I have acquired mephaa.org, as a real registered domain.

Network layout:

Network Diagram

Mephaa LangDoc Program Network Diagram

We have a dynamic IP from our neighbor’s router. (We share the line and they are up stream. That is just the way things work in this location in Mexico. They are in turn connected to the ISP.)
The connection from the neighbor is hardwired to the WAN port on the Airport Extreme. The Airport Extreme is using NAT & DHCP (see settings below). I have 9 machines connected to the Airport. One of which is the MacMini server. It is the only one that is hard wired to the Airport. The rest are laptops that connect wirelessly.
The MacMini is assigned a stable IP address by the Airport Extreme based on its MAC address. The IP address for the server behind the firewall: 10.0.1.5.

The Settings on the AirPort Extreme:

AirPort Extreme Summary
AirPort Extreme Base Station
Airport Extreme Wireless
Airport Extreme Guest Network
Airport Express Access Control
Airport Extreme Internet Connection
Airport Extreme TCP/IP
AirPort Extreme DHCP
Airport Express NAT
Airport Extreme Printers

The Challenge: As I presented it and discussed it on apple’s forums, on Nov. 20th.

Status: (Nov 20th)

We do not have an outside domain name that we have purchased. We just are using the name of the computer as it was set up during the install of the OSX.

I have the Wiki, Calendar and Blog features running at macminimarlett.local.
I can type macminimarlett.local in any web browser on the server side of the Airport Extreme and access the OSX provided WebServices (aka the wiki, blog and calendar.)

I would like to make the mercurial repository available at: hg.macminimarlett.local
I would like to make the refbase instance available at: ref.macminimarlett.local
These “additional” websites are hosted on the same machine as MacMiniMarlett.

§1. So What must I do to get hg.macminimarlett.local to resolve at all to anything?
§2. So What must I do to get hg.macminimarlett.local to resolve to my mercurial instance?

Currently I can not get hg.macminimarlett.local to resolve at all. “Safari can not find the server”. But browsers do find macminimarlett.local.
This leads me to think that it is a problem with my OSX server settings not with my install of Mercurial.

Suggestions offered on the 20th:

  1. Do not use .local.
  2. Do not use .private.
  3. Change the domain to something other than the computer name.
  4. Computers on the LAN can find macminimarlett.local because of bonjour. Not because of any special DNS entry.

We dropped the .local and the .private and switched to mephaa. instead of using macminimarlett.. I left the macminimarlett. zone in the DNS records just incase. This leads us to the server settings on Nov. 21st.

To this point I had been assuming that .private in the DNS registry was being translated to .local in the bowsers. This was an errant assumption.

Server Settings: Nov 21st

MacMiniMarlett DNS Settings

Suggestions received from John on Nov. 21st:

Your DNS is incorrect. Run the terminal command:
sudo changeip -checkhostname
You need to get this sorted out because it effects a lot services.

Here’s the crash course version: the . (period) at the end of the domain name means it is a full qualified domain name (meaning that it is real domain that real people use, like google.com.) also the primary domain record should be like this macminimarlett.com. Or macminimarlett.private. Or macminimartlett.local. (beaware that Microsoft Server 2008+ is droping .local support and you need a real domain name and public IP/dedicated IP – which means using .local isn’t future proofing).

One thing to know, the primary domain record doesn’t have to be a fully qualified domain, but it should be as everything is heading that way in the future.

At the moment your server is thinking the macminimarlett. And mepaa. Are the .com part of the domain name.

Yeah there will be a lot of confusion in the mepaa domain record as there isn’t any reverse mapping for it. And the cname record is at the .com level (layer 1) which won’t resolve very well for clients.

Next, what is the forwarder settings set to? These should be set to the ISP DNS and then to the router (you can add as many DNS servers as you like for redundancy).

What is doing DHCP to the clients? What DNS are they getting? The clients need to know where your subdomains are in the network. For example if a pc is typing in hg.macminimarlett (which is a bad idea – it should be hg.macminimarlett.private or something like that) then the pc client checks the DNS server for which server (IP address) has the subdomain hg.macminimarlett – but if the DNS server doesn’t have a record of hg.macminimarlett then the DNS server will reply with not a real address (because it doesn’t know who that is).

Regards,

Nov. 22nd.

I now realize that the syntax of my DNS entries (when and only when I am not using a registered domain name) need to be:

  • For a Zone: <Some Name>.<Something Unique>.

    • Where the above corresponds to the following: (domain name level).(TDL level).

  • For the domain root, which is an entry in the zone: <Some Name>.<Something Unique>.

    • Where the above corresponds to the following: (domain name level).(TDL level).

  • For a subdomain, which is also an entry in the zone: <Some Name>.<Some Name>.<Something Unique>.

    • Where the above corresponds to the following: (subdomain prefix).(domain name level).(TDL level).

My current entries in my DNS are not set up this way. I need to change them. Before I do that I should likely run the changeip -checkhostname as suggested by John.

I ran sudo changeip -checkhostname
And this is what I got:

changeip Results

Now my question is: is this message saying I need to run this again? What am I to do with the results of the message from changeip? I read the Manuals but that did not yield any profound insights.

I added .private to all the DNS records in the DNS service, in order to fix the syntax of the DNS records as indicated by John. After that I ran changeip again. It now shows that there is nothing needing to be changed. I think this part is now resolved.

Resolved changeip Results

Now this is what the server settings are (Noon 22nd) :

Server Settings (Noon 22nd)
Reverse Zone Name Settings
Aside: I corrected a spelling error in the DNS Records where mephaa was mispelled as mepaa. All the records now read with the mephaa spelling, as indicated in the second picture.

I got hg.macminimarlett.private to resolve from the server to a test index.html page on the server. But I could not get it to resolve from a client on the network.

  • Is this because I have the wrong type of records?
  • Is this because I am not passing the DNS records to where the clients are looking for the records?
  • How do I pass these DNS entries to my clients?
  • Is this something I have to enter in the Airport Extreme? If so which entries on which lines?

Airport Extreme TCP/IP

From Camalot via the Apple forum post:

A hostname is a record of a host within the domain. For example, hg.macminimarlett.private is the hostname for the host hg within the macminimarlett.private domain.

I don’t see anything in the Server Admin titled “hostname”… There is one thing under the Primary zone that says “hostname” but what should this be set to? the IP of the computer on this LAN?

Server Admin doesn’t know what additional hostname you want for your domain. It’s up to you to create them. You create additional records (either ‘A’ records (Alias) for physical machines, or ‘CNAME’ records for additional hostnames that you want to map to an existing machine.

§7. Ok so in what manner do I add hg.macminimarlett.private. to that zone? Do I add it as a CNAME, as a secondary zone, as a Machine (A) recored?

In this case it sounds like you want to add three records to your existing zone.

One A record for your server (call it whatever you want, but server.macminimarlett.private seems to make sense). Give this the IP address of your server.
Two CNAME records – one for hg and one for ref that both point to server.macminimarlett.private.

Now you’ll be able to resolve all three hostnames, and they’ll all point to the same physical IP address. From there it’s just Apache’s configuration telling it how to deal with the different requests.

From John:

Yeah there will be a lot of confusion in the mepaa [sic] domain record as there isn’t any reverse mapping for it. And the cname record is at the .com level (layer 1) which won’t resolve very well for clients.

Next, what is the forwarder settings set to? These should be set to the ISP DNS and then to the router (you can add as many DNS servers as you like for redundancy).

What is doing DHCP to the clients? What DNS are they getting? The clients need to know where your subdomains are in the network. For example if a pc is typing in hg.macminimarlett (which is a bad idea – it should be hg.macminimarlett.private or something like that) then the pc client checks the DNS server for which server (IP address) has the subdomain hg.macminimarlett – but if the DNS server doesn’t have a record of hg.macminimarlett then the DNS server will reply with not a real address (because it doesn’t know who that is).

I am not sure what is giving DNS to the clients. I did have to put something (I think it is the IP of my neighbors router, see the image above) in the DNS settings of the Airport Extreme in order to get the Internet to be passed to the clients. So what I did was put the internal IP address of the MacMini Server in the DNS field on the Airport Extreme. I also found this interesting: http://www.dyndnscommunity.com/questions/4567/custom-dns-with-subdomain-and-airport-extreme

It seems that an AirPort Extreme will always identify itself as the DNS server. If I want the network to look for a DNS server elsewhere. Then I need to follow one of these options: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121990, http://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Airport_express or http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2288123&tstart=0. (Restart might be required. Also I might be looking for something called “split horizon DNS”.)

http://www.dyndns.com/support/kb/apple_airport_with_custom_dns.html
http://www.dyndnscommunity.com/questions/1087/apple-airport-does-not-create-global-dynamic-hostname-in-custom-dns-zone

Merging iLife Libraries

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The Problem:
One user on in a small business / family network can’t use (with metadata) all the media in a colleague’s or family member’s iTunes or iPhoto Library.

In our family there are three Macs (2 everyday machines and a server). On many work and personal tasks we function as a small workgroup. Unfortunately iTunes and iPhoto do not facilitate the sharing of media libraries (or for that matter the merging of media libraries). For instance, my wife had her own music and photo collection before we got married. Now if I want to browse that collection from my machine, there is iPhoto & iTunes sharing. But I can not add tags or other metadata to photos on her Mac. I can not create smart folders which we both can use.

iTunes
For our music we moved my collection to the Server and made it like a “media center”. When we get new music we add it to the server. If we want a copy on our own machines we pull it as needed. i.e. for an iMove project. This solution has not allowed my wife to add her collection to the server, nor has it solved the manny duplicates which exist because we like many of the same songs. Now I have found a solution to this: PowerTunes.

iPhoto
Now the same problems exist for our photos. However, there is no real advantage (or software) for hosting the family photos on our sever. But we still need to define a photo capture strategy.

  • When we take new photos, to which computer are we going to download the photos?
  • Where will we have the master library?

I don’t have a complete solution to our photo capture, retention and access needs but iPhoto Library Manager is the only software out there that will let us maintain the metadata and merge our iPhoto Libraries. However, This is a fantastic first step strategy:

  • Consolidate the iPhoto Libraries.
  • Designate an computer to be the Master Library holder.
  • Share that iPhoto library across the network.
  • Back that computer up.