Posted on in System Administration
If you've ever had to administer a Mac OS X system from afar, you know how difficult it can be to manage network settings. The Network Preference Panel under System Preferences is a great tool if you have remote access to the <acronym title="Graphical User Interface">GUI</acronym>, but …
Posted on in System Administration
While doing further research for my OS X Caching Only Name Server series, it has come to my attention that a couple of my methods (specifically relating to Startup Items and starting the daemon) are outdated. Although these methods may have been acceptable in pre-Tiger versions of OS X, Mac …
Posted on in Graphics Design
Welcome to post #100! Since this is a bit of a milestone, I thought I'd put up a super chart.
The image below shows the grow of RSS subscribers over the last 100 posts.
Although the growth is modest, I think its impressive considering this site has lived between Google …
Posted on in System Administration
This information is really geared for pre-Tiger versions of OS X. In OS X 10.4 (Tiger), the BIND daemon is controlled by launchd and is pre-configured (although disabled). BIND Startup in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) has more detailed information. Although outdated, this article still includes useful information …
Posted on in System Administration
Before we can start running BIND on OS X, we have to make a few configuration changes. Although BIND is pre-installed in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), it's not ready to run right out of the box. We've already created our Startup Item, but now we need to cleanup …
Posted on in System Administration
This information is really geared for pre-Tiger versions of OS X. In OS X 10.4 (Tiger), the BIND daemon is controlled by launchd and is pre-configured (although disabled). BIND Startup in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) has more detailed information. Although outdated, this article still includes useful information …
Posted on in System Administration
By default, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) comes with BIND 9 pre-installed and pre-configured to operate in caching-only mode. Unfortunately, the operating system is not configured to start the server at boot time, or even use the server if it was running. In this series of articles, we'll create …
Posted on in Software
By default, a BIND DNS server will report which version it is running to anyone that's interested. All it takes is a simple lookup of the version.bind text record in the chaos class of your server. Check this out:
Skadi:~ slap$ dig version.bind txt chaos @localhost
; <<>> DiG 9 …Posted on in Software
It's recently come to my attention that a large percentage of the Slaptijack site has ended up in the dreaded "Google Supplemental Index". This means that key pages are not being served during normal searches. You can see which pages are in the Supplemental Index by running the following search …
Posted on in Networking
DS3 (also known as T3) scrambling is not an issue that comes up very often. It's something every network administrator should know about, though. After all, it just might save your bacon.
Some physical layer protocols depend on the transition from 1 to 0 in a frame to maintain clocking …
Posted on in Networking
Most network administrators should be familiar with Spanning Tree Protocol (STP; IEEE 802.1D). <acronym title="Spanning Tree Protocol">STP</acronym> is tasked with ensuring there are no loops in a bridged network. Unfortunately, STP is an older protocol and doesn't quite mesh with today's high speed networks. Here are …
Posted on in Software
This is just a little humorous anecdote along the lines of frantically searching the house for the glasses you happen to be wearing. After yesterday's somewhat "heavy" post, I thought the mood needed a little lightening.
I've only recently (in the last month or so) begun using Gmail as my …
Posted on in System Administration
I came across this graphic by way of Pick the Brain who found it at Creating Passionate Users. This image perfectly describes what I believe all network and system administrators should be striving for.
All too often, when their ideas are confronted, I hear established network and system administrators say …
Posted on in Networking
Is your network bandwidth being consumed by Peer-to-Peer (P2P) traffic? (Hint: If you don't know, it's time to fire up NBAR and do a little investigating.) One way to stop P2P traffic is to use an access-list to block traffic on the well-know P2P ports. Unfortunately, many P2P technologies no …
Posted on in Software
I've written before regarding the command-line email client Mutt, and how useful it can be. Unfortunately, Mutt is designed to read a local mail spool by default. If you need to use Mutt to read email from a remote mail server, <acronym title="Internet Message Access Protocol">IMAP</acronym> may …
