Leopard Server

With my new (to me) G5 PowerMac, I’ve been experimenting with Leopard Server all weekend. Things I’m setting it up to do:

  1. Primarily a Time Machine server.  This works great so far.  Really need an N router w/ gigabit.  I want to stick with DD-WRT, so I’m looking at the WRT310N, but I want something that’ll do dual band since I still have legacy (ha!) G devices on my network and don’t want to suffer speed hits from my N devices.  The WRT610n is ideal, but DD-WRT isn’t stable on it yet. I don’t want an Airport Extreme due to lack of local DNS.
  2. OpenDirectory Master.  Mainly just because I want to get better with it.
  3. File Server… easy enough.  I can definitely appreciate the finer grained controls that ACL’s provide and being able to use them via Server Admin.  Tiger’s Workgroup Manager has propagation issues in my experience.  We’ll see if that’s the same with Leopard.
  4. Web server & Mysql Server.  For testing stuff.  Apache this time around is so much better.  Reminiscent of a small CMS, with blog & wiki capabilities built in.  I think I’ll stick with the OS X native versions this time instead of rolling my own.
  5. iCal Server — if I can get around the infamous Python CPU bug.  Slows the G5 to a crawl!

Bummers:

  1. Only two drive slots and I want at least RAID1, but won’t do that on the boot drive.  I might add an external FireWire 800 enclosure and RAID that.  For now, I’m using what I have with the my USB external enclosure and doing backups of the internal Data drive to that.
  2. 2GB RAM can get used up pretty quick with all the things I’m doing.  Probably looking to upgrade to 4GB soon.
  3. Still not convinced Leopard Server is right for that G5.  I’m wondering what apps won’t run on it.  Considering partitioning the main HD in half and installing Leopard Client as well.  Kinda defeats the purpose of having a full-time server tho.

Hints:

  1. Make SURE!!! forward and reverse DNS lookups work when installing Leopard Server.  Make your life easier and set up your DHCP/DNS server first!  That’s why DD-WRT came in handy by creating the static reservation.  Here’s a hint:  Under the Services tab, set the DHCP server Used Domain to LAN & WAN, then set the LAN domain to local.  After that, create a static reservation for the server.  Your end goal, once you have the server installed, is to have sudo changeip -checkhostname not throw any complaints. This will also make setting up additional services go smoothly. Trust me, you WANT to do this FIRST!! This is what you want to see:

    administrator$ sudo changeip -checkhostname

    Primary address = 192.168.1.100

    Current HostName = Server.local
    DNS HostName = Server.local

    The names match. There is nothing to change.

What I’d like to do is actually make the server visible to the world without my ISP knowing about it.  I’m not sure if I want to do this via proxy or port forwarding or what yet.  I’ll have to think about it harder.

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