From the category archives:

Technology

Setting Up A Caching DNS Server on OSX Server

by Ron Bieber on Monday, January 18, 2010

I’ve been running the same Linux server for about 10 years. Consequently, its pretty slow and outdated, and when I finally had time to upgrade it to Ubuntu from SuSE 9 while I was on vacation, found that I couldn’t really get anything but Ubuntu 8.04 installed on it. So it was time for an upgrade.

I opted to go with a Mac Mini server – for a few reasons. The price was basically comparable to an Intel server with the same technical specifications (minus any kind of CDROM drive, which I found out later) – but the big selling point for me was the amount of space I could save in the office with the Mini. A side benefit was, of course, being able to play with Snow Leopard Server.

After the initial set server setup – which was painless – my first task was to create a caching DNS server so that all of the machines in the house could point to the same place they were when the Linux server is shut down. One of the primary purposes of the Linux server over the years, aside from being a file server, has been to cache and manage local DNS for the machines in the house. I already had plans to run an Ubuntu Server in a VM on this box to replace my aging Linux box (I still need Linux around), but didn’t think it was acceptable to have to boot the machine, THEN a VM in order to have DNS working. I also did not want to do a DNS setup on a box by box basis on every machine in the house.

I was a little confused at first. I’m used to configuring bind directly. After some googling around and not finding much of anything around doing this on OSX Server, I posted a tweet asking if any of my followers knew of a HOWTO that would explain what I needed to do.

I actually tweeted a little too soon. I think I found the settings about 2 minutes after the tweet went out. It was way easier than I thought it would be and I thought I’d throw up a quick step-by-step tutorial so that folks wanting to do the same thing could save themselves a couple of seconds.

So here we go.

In the dock, find the “Server Admin” icon and click it. It looks like this:

OSX Server System Admin

OSX Server System Admin

When the “Server Admin” Tool opens, you will see the main screen like the following. The blue arrow is pointing to the domain you specified while setting up the server.

OSX Server Admin Tool Main Screen

OSX Server Admin Tool Main Screen

Open up the domain for your network, and you will see a bunch of services to configure. Select DNS as shown in the following screen shot:

OSX Server Admin Services Menu

OSX Server Admin Services Menu

Once you select DNS in the side navigation, select “Settings” at the top. This will show you the following screen:

Server Admin DNS Settings Screen

Server Admin DNS Settings Screen

You’ll see a box conveniently titled “Forwarders”. Add the IP addresses of the DNS servers you would like to forward requests to in this box by clicking the ‘+’ key and adding each independent IP. As you can see here, I am primarily using Open DNS with Google DNS as a backup. Trust me, contrary to the picture, OpenDNS is first.

Once you have entered your DNS IP addresses, click “Save”. Point your boxes to the IP for your Mac Mini server and voila! You have a caching DNS server.

I hope this was helpful. For those of us who are used to configuring bind with vi, it may be a little confusing or intimidating to try to mimic this functionality on OSX Server. As you can see, its really a no-brainer – and no text editors need be opened.

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Things for iPhone (Time Management)

by Ron Bieber on Thursday, August 21, 2008

I’ve finally decided to bite the bullet and buy Things, an application on the iPhone for task management (Getting Things Done style). I’ve only started using it this morning, but I can already see the benefit of getting things out of my head and into my inbox for categorization. I’ll write more on whether I actually stick with it and find it effective later on.

All I can say is, I hope so. I’m not doing too well these days on remembering the volume of things I need to accomplish – and paper and notebooks just don’t do it for me.

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Miscellaneous Updates for February 2008

by Ron Bieber on Saturday, March 8, 2008

I’m doing an extremely bad job of keeping the site fresh over the last few months or so. I figured I’d give a quick update of things going on.

I’m Still Not Smoking

I finally started the Step 3 of the Nicoderm CQ program. This one has been rough. This is where you really start physically feeling the consequences of nicotine being removed from your system. I’ve been completely exhausted for the last week. Apparently, that there nicotine is one powerful stimulant and really screws with your metabolism. Your body takes some time to equalize itself and get itself back to where it needs to be naturally. I’m hoping mine gets there soon – because I’ve not had a good time over the past week.

The interesting thing about these “stop smoking aids” is that they defer you dealing with the real issue until you have so much skin in the game that you can’t start again without feeling an intense feeling of failure. Brilliant, but I can tell you that first step gives you an overly simplified view of what it takes to quit smoking. It starts getting a little harsher at step 2 and now at step 3 you really start PHYSICALLY feeling it. The only thing worse will be when Step 3 is over and my body starts eliminating nicotine all together.

Like I said though, I have too much skin in the game now to restart – I think.

New iPhone User

Address Book on iPhoneJonna bought me an iPhone for our anniversary, and I have to say that aside from the GPS she got me for Christmas, which allows me to go out by myself and still be able to get home, it is about the coolest thing for me from a productivity perspective that we have added to my highly disorganized life.

I’m finally able to get all my contact information in one place where it is accessible at any time. I can take notes, I can look things up on the web and I can check personal email. From a browsing perspective, I can get to things that are a part of my life but are blocked at the firewall at work (which is great as well). I feel free.

Now, it hasn’t been without its problems. The 1.1.3 software that came with the phone dropped a lot of calls. It wound up pretty frustrating and I kept my work supplied cell phone so that I could actually hold calls without them getting dumped. The 1.1.4 update took care of this though and now it works like a real phone.

I love the contact management included in the phone. Support for multiple numbers per contact and custom labelled information (including notes) lets me keep track of all the information I could ever want about someone. I can even attach a picture. Integration with the Mac Address book allows me to keep my contacts up to date without having to type into the phone.

And speaking of typing into the phone – I love not having to type on a standard phone keypad. The automatic spell-checking sometimes gives me a run for my money, and more often than not makes me sound retarded, like this little exchange with Jonna:

Trouble With Abbreviations

<Insert large sigh from Jonna because I don’t listen or read>

Overall though, I think between the GPS for Christmas and the iPhone this month, I’ve received the two most useful (and really most used) gifts ever.

As an aside, for those who are obsessed with not scratching or smudging their iPhone or other Apple products, Jonna also picked up a skin called Best Skins Ever for both Kelsi and myself, which we applied a couple of weeks ago. Kind of scary at first (you need to use water to apply it), but they really are the best skins ever. You don’t even know they’re there. I’m definitely going to pick up one for my iPod, as soon as I get a round tuit.

Well thats it from the Labs for last month. I’m sure as the weather starts to warm and the nicotine continues to seep out of my system, I’ll have more energy to blog about useful things.

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How To Set Up Mac OSX To Print to a Windows Print Share

by Ron Bieber October 28, 2007 Macintosh

I found one annoyance about Mac OSX. I could not figure out how to set my Mac up to print to our shared printer that is connected to a Windows XP machine. Well, thats not necessarily true. I figured it out once, but for some reason it just stopped working using the standard printer setup. [...]

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iPod Power Adapter – Sold Separately

by Ron Bieber August 19, 2007 Macintosh

Photo by rbieber Kudos to Apple for getting an even larger share of my wallet. When you buy an 80G iPod, the only way you can charge it is through your PC. In order to charge via AC power (say when your getting ready to travel and will not be taking your home machine with [...]

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Subversion, MediaWiki, WordPress, and LDAP

by Ron Bieber July 17, 2007 Open Source Software

One of the biggest arguments you’ll get in deploying open source software in a corporate environment perception that they are extra, standalone applications. If your corporation uses an LDAP server, you can get some big wins by ensuring that your open source applications can authenticate with your corporate LDAP store, showing integration with the main [...]

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InstruMental Case Instrumental Guitar Podcast

by Ron Bieber July 5, 2007 Music

Dave B, the creator of the Guitars Suck video series has started the InstruMental Case podcast, a podcast dedicated to instrumental guitar music. The pilot episode (episode 0) has been posted and I have to say, I like it!

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Subversion and SSL Troubles

by Ron Bieber June 29, 2007 Subversion

I decided to upgrade my home Subversion repository to version 1.4.3 as soon as it was released. Since then, my ViewVC application has ceased to work, getting a Python exception every time I try to execute it. Creating a small Python program that just imports the library (from svn import fs) gave me the following [...]

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Lecture from Linus Torvalds on Source Control

by Ron Bieber June 4, 2007 Remaindered

Check out this really interesting lecture by Linus Torvalds on Git, the source control system he started for the Linux kernel. Its an interesting talk, where he compares Git with other version control systems.

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Breathing Room

by Ron Bieber March 19, 2007 Technology

Photo by rbieber My recent upgrade to an 80G iPod gives me way more breathing room than I had with the 20G, and I can finally carry family photos around to boot!

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Building Scalable Web Sites by Cal Henderson

by Ron Bieber March 8, 2007 Books

I have about three books that I am reading on and off but have been unable to focus on any of them for any length of time. Tom The Architect mentioned a book to me a few months ago called Building Scalable Web Sites: Building, Scaling, and Optimizing the Next Generation of Web Applications by [...]

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ComputerWorld Picks Ruby on Rails as #1 Technology To Know

by Ron Bieber March 7, 2007 Remaindered

I was browsing the Riding Rails blog and saw this reference to a ComputerWorld article that rates Ruby on Rails as the #1 technology to know in 2007.

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The Shoemakers Son Always Goes Barefoot

by Ron Bieber March 2, 2007 Business / Leadership

The other night the ignition switch on the furnace went out in the house. I watched as Jonna spent a ton of time searching for the contact information for the guy who came out the last time we had a problem. It took quite a while to find the information, but finally she found it. [...]

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Ed Gibbs on Enterprise Tools

by Ron Bieber January 14, 2007 Business / Leadership

A great post by Ed Gibbs entitled “Wasting Money on Expensive Enterprise Tools”. Its shocking sometimes how much money is spent on things just because they have the word “enterprise” in their description. Anyone in IT will smile to themselves when reading this post.

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Free Web Site Monitoring at mon.itor.us

by Ron Bieber January 6, 2007 Remaindered

I’ve created an account at mon.itor.us, a free web site monitoring tool I found in Cote’s Flickr feed. Looks interesting.

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Open Source Alarm Clock?

by Ron Bieber January 1, 2007 Remaindered

Jonna pointed me to Chumby, an open source alarm clock. According to the article, the clock will run for $150 and because of its open source nature, will have an “array of downloadable, hackable widgets”.

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Google Acquires YouTube

by Ron Bieber October 9, 2006 Remaindered

Well, all of the rumor talk can stop. TechCrunch reports today that Google has officially acquired YouTube. Google also has an announcement on their Press Center, in which they say that the acquisition is for $1.65B in stock.

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Pathway Wikipedia Visualizer

by Ron Bieber September 27, 2006 Macintosh

Photo by rbieber The Pathway Wikipedia Visualizer. Pretty cool application. I played around with this application a little tonight. For each page you go to, it lays out all of the links for you. You navigate based on the links laid out and you can keep track visually of everywhere you’ve been. Way cool.

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Using a Mac – A MindMap

by Ron Bieber September 20, 2006 Technology

Photo by rbieber Experimenting with MindJet MindManager, an application used to create mind maps. Tom the Architect has talked to me about mind maps a bajillon times, but I have been reluctant to start using them because the only "free" program was a Java app. The folks at MindJet shot me a complimentary copy of [...]

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Flickr: Error Message While Receiving Windows Update

by Ron Bieber September 14, 2006 Flickr Picks

Photo by cky3 Error message recieved when getting updates. For some reason, this picture cracked me up. I know this has happened to me before but for some reason it didn’t strike me as weird until seeing this on Flickr.

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