birds like wires

I’ve just bumped into this little chestnut again, and thought it would be worth documenting quickly, once and for all.

If you run Mac OS X Server, the one thing that is more important than anything else is to make sure the DNS hostname is set correctly. It’s fundamental – everything breaks if it’s not working. Out of the box, Server even configures its own DNS server to make sure the details are correct.

Now, I run my own internal DNS using Mac OS X Server, just so I don’t need to remember IP addresses. However, after adding an address to the DNS yesterday, the hostname of the server magically changed. I didn’t ask it to, it just happened. It was time to break out the repair tools.

Three Commands Will Save You

They are changeip, scutil and dscacheutil. Remember them, because they are your only friends. If the DNS is iffy, Server Admin runs away and needs some coaxing to play again (which, of course, is really helpful).

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tags: apple, os x, servers

Here’s a fun one. You’ve set up Software Update Server on your Mac OS X Server system and all is fine. Then you realise that you’re the proud owner of a directory containing 52GB of software updates and you’ve put it in a silly place.

You shut down Software Update in Server Admin and move the directory to a bigger drive. You reconfigure the path and then re-enable the server. You see from the logs that all is well and you fire up Software Update on your client machine.

Hooray. That’s not quite what we were aiming for.

Foolishly, I have in the past simply resigned myself to ‘fixing’ this by deleting the software update directory, recreating a blank one and erasing all of the configuration files in /etc/swupd. This is a silly thing to do as you’ll end up downloading that 52GB all over again. It turns out the solution is ridiculously simple.

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tags: apple, mac, os x, servers

There’s a little quirk when you’re controlling menu extras for Mac OS X client systems using MCX. Well, there’s more than one quirk, but you know what I mean.

By default, new users of Mac OS X systems get Blutooth, Time Machine and Volume menu extras, as well as the clock. The Spotlight control is separate, so we won’t mention it here. On our systems I don’t really want to display the Bluetooth menu extra, we don’t use Time Machine and the volume is controlled by the external audio interfaces, so they could all do with going away.

Digging through ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost shows that this is handled by a configuration file called com.apple.systemuiserver.XXXX.plist and as such you can control what appears using the configuration options in Workgroup Manager. The key you’re after is sensibly named dontAutoLoad, which can contain the paths to any Menu Extras.

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tags: apple, mac, mcx, os x

Over at ethernetworks.de there’s a really good description of how to overclock an Apple iMac G4. Unfortunately, their table of resistor positions only holds true for the 167MHz USB 2.0 model iMac and mine is slightly older and has a 133MHz bus.

You can work out the appropriate PLL resistor settings by referring to the datasheet for the MPC7455 (see Table 17: MPC7455 Microprocessor PLL Configuration Example for 1.0 GHz Parts). However, figuring the combinations out can be a bit dizzying, so after working out the settings for 1.27GHz, I figured out the rest just in case I needed them in the future.

‘R’ = resistor present, ‘-’ = no connection.

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tags: apple, imac, mac, overclocking, ppc