primary DNS name - for OS X Server 10.6 Snow Leopard.

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Level 1

10 points

primary DNS name - for OS X Server 10.6 Snow Leopard.

When it comes to DNS - I am confused. Our company has approx 30 computers. We have Mac OS X 10.5.8 running on a iMac 2.6 Ghz, which runs quite well however I believe has some conflicts due to the DNS setup.

We have now purchased a new iMac 21.5" 3.06Ghz for which I will do a fresh install with Snow Leopard Server. I have tried installation and configuration once, during installation the Primary DNS name did not come automatic - as described in the Getting Started manual - however it required that I input a DNS name. I thus used "coralserver.private" for the primary DNS name, however, when I tried to open the Server Preferences, it was unable to find the server. I then opened Server Admin and was able to log into "coral.local"

I'm confused.

Before I go to deep into re-installing and setting things up I would appreciate some basic advise on setting up DNS (Primary DNS name). I am not a wiz at detailed aspects of server configurations, and would like to just configure the server to handle a local network with our company. What I really appreciate is a simple explanation for a simple setup, with the intent of making use of server services such as web, ichat, address book, file sharing, open directory.

Is a primary DNS name such as "coral.local" suitable?

iMac 2.5Ghz Mac OS Server 10.5.5, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Nov 6, 2009 4:31 AM

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Answer 1

Nov 6, 2009 7:47 PM in response to vbuell

The simple answer is 'you did it correctly'.

.private is a valid DNS Zone (domain) for one that you do not want shared externally. The simple answer to the .local issue is that each machine on your network can be found by its machinename.local via the Zero Configuration DNS service, ZCONF, or as it is also known by, Bonjour.

You can read the barest of info about it here: http://support.apple.com/kb/TA20999
which explains a bit about multicasting dns.

So excepting that for some reason your .private network does not seem to resolve, you have done everything right. My guess for the lack of .private resolution is that you have not set your TCP/IP up to use the server as your DNS server so it is relying on MDNS (ZCONF, Bonjour).

Peter

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Answer 2

vbuell Author

Level 1

10 points

Nov 6, 2009 9:26 PM in response to Peter Scordamaglia

thanks Peter.

I will try to see if I can get the TCP/IP set up for the DNS server and hopefully it might resolve the problem.

If I was to reinstall, can you please let me know if it is an easy process to set up the DNS name using our registered domain name = xxxxxx.com??? Would this be with "xxxxx.com" or "www.xxxx.com"?

many thanks

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Answer 3

Nov 7, 2009 1:23 AM in response to vbuell

Hi

Your domain would be mydomain.com not http://www.mydomain.com. If you had a dedicated ftp server (for example) you could access it using http://ftp.yourdomain.com. That's if you configure things to work that way. It could just easily work using ftp://123.345.78.90. This would be true for anything else you wanted to serve externally or internally using names rather than numbers. The name is a lot easier to remember than the number. At its simplest DNS maps (or resolves) names to numbers (on the forward lookup) and numbers to names (on the reverse lookup).

When contemplating administering your own server regardless of platform it's required to have at least a basic understanding of DNS and TCP/IP. Some command line will be necessary sooner or later.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/284
http://www.iana.org/

Are good places to start.

Tony

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Answer 4

Kostas B

Level 1

94 points

Nov 8, 2009 7:55 AM in response to Antonio Rocco

Please post the result of: sudo changeip -checkhostname.

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