Not photo-related, but..

I am the resident techno-nerd in the family. I hear a lot of barely understandable muffled calls from across the house that sound something like “My #$^^%$#!ing computer is $@#$!@#$mumblemumble”. Proving Pavlov was entirely correct, I immediately jump up from what I am doing and try to track down the source of the digital discontent.

One thing that is always daunting is dealing with a crashed hard drive. It will inevitably occur when an important project has reached a critical point. So I figured that I could potentially save myself a lot of headaches if I came up with a way to use the Mac Time Machine backups over the network for all the computers in the family that are not being used by me. So I got one of the inexpensive new Mac Mini Snow Leopard servers. It has two disks and a full copy of Snow Leopard server. The enticing description on the Apple Store page makes it sound like the server is just as easy to set up as a new MacBook Pro or something. A couple of clicks and about five minutes of time and voila! – you have a fully functional server which can be used for keeping backups of your family’s important data.

Well, this is bullshit. Setting up a server is nothing like setting up any of the other stuff that Apple sells. It is weird and inobvious stuff.

I have just finished getting a Snow Leopard Mac Mini server set up after a day of frustration, research and local networking mischief, and I want to make this post so that some other poor soul googling for the answer will have at least a chance of stumbling across these hints.

Here is all I wanted to do:

• Set up a Time Machine server on my network for my family to use.
• Set up a simple File-sharing drive
• Make it all redundant by mirroring the drives.

So here are my hints:

• Don’t believe the automated server setup when it tells you that you can use a wireless network to connect the server. This is all just soothing talk to entice you into buying one. Call Apple support as I did today, and the clever guys on the other end of the phone line will tell you in no uncertain terms that you need to be directly connected to your switch or router by an ethernet cable. Period. I can tell you from personal experience that this is true.
• You want a mirrored RAID? You are going to have to partition and format your disks using Disk Utility and reload the Snow Leopard server software from the DVD. Which means you are going to need one of the MacBook Air Superdrives. This is the only USB device I am aware of that allows a Mac to boot from. Or connect a MacPro laptop with a Firewire connection to the Mac Mini and ‘borrow’ its built in Superdrive.
• Don’t think about trying to do this configuration without a display and keyboard and mouse attached to the Mac Mini. Just borrow one from somewhere else until you get the server configured. Later, you will be able to administer the server from any computer remotely.
• Put the install DVD in the Superdrive (or laptop slot that is firewire connected to your Mac Mini). Turn on the server and hold down the option key on your Mac Mini’s keyboard. Wait until the option to select the DVD as the boot device presents itself, and then select that.
• Look up at the upper left of the display and select Utilities-> Disk Utility. It will open and you will see the two disks you are about to reformat. Select the first disk and click on the partition tab. Make two partitions. I chose to make the main partition for the server 200GB and named it ‘Server HD1′. The remaining space was used for a partition I named ‘TM Server1′. Click the button that will now erase, partition, and format that disk. Goodbye pre-installed software! I now chose the other disk and made two more similarly sized partitions and name them ‘Server HD2′ (200GB also) and the remaining partition ‘TM Server2′. Select RAID again and drag ‘Server HD1′ and ‘Server HD2′ over to the panel and name the mirrored RAID something like Server HD. Create the RAID set. Do the same for the ‘TM Server1′ and ‘TMS Server2′ partitions and create the second mirrored RAID partition.
• Exit Disk Utility and choose ‘Install Snow Leopard Server’ and choose the ‘Server HD’ RAID volume as your install disk. And wait for about 30 minutes as the system software is reloaded onto the new RAID partition.
• Go through all the setup stuff with the Snow Leopard server. But here are two ‘gotchas’:
  • you will be asked to give a so-called ‘Fully qualified domain name’ for your server. If all you want to do is access the server on your local network, give it a name like ‘server.homersimpson.private’. And then name the server something creative like ‘server’. This is important, because failing to do this will make you seriously crazy. It does not really matter what the name is as long as it does not use the word “local” in the name. This name is reserved. Also, give your server an IP address that is in the same subnet as your local network, but with a larger last number such as “101″. A lot of home networks just use the default 192.168.1.xx notation, so you could use something like 192.168.1.101. Just write this number down, because it will eventually be the nameserver all of your local network computers use to access the internet.
  • Don’t enable any services. None. Nada. Zilch. Just install the software and you will come back later and configure the server. The Apple rep on the support call I made said that it is better to add services later as you need them rather than accept the defaults that the installation software wants you to make.
• Let it install and give the admin account a name and password you can remember.
• If things go well, it should install and present you with a login window. Log in with the admin username and password you created earlier. First thing you will need to do is set up your server as the main local DNS server. This is the piece of software that takes a browser’s address of “www.iamlame.org” and turns it into a number like 45.88.92.111 that is the actual IP address which the webpage sits at. But since you created a fake ‘fully qualified domain name’ for you server, when the computers on your local network try to use their existing DNS server, it cannot find what IP address the name resolves to. So what you need to do is this:
  • First, you need to configure your server to handle all the name requests it knows about (in this case, it really is only the server’s name itself, and nothing else), and then forward the rest to a real server somewhere. This is where it can get knotty if you read all the instruction manuals and talk to customer support at Apple. Just do this: open Server Admin. Click the little arrow to expose the services you have running. This should be very limited at the moment. Click on the DNS label in the left hand panel, and then select the settings tab. In the lower ‘Forwarder IP Addresses’, click the ‘plus’ button and type in 8.8.8.8. Click somewhere outside to set this number and click the ‘plus’ again and add this address just below it: 8.8.4.4. These are Google DNS addresses. Google seems to know what they are doing with this whole newfangled internet thang, and you can trust them to give you a fast lookup. It will look something like this:
    
  • Next, you will need to troop around to all your other computers in the house that are using your wireless network, and open System Preferences and then choose the Network icon. Select Airport, and then click the ‘Advanced…’ button. Click the DNS tab, and then delete whatever is there and then type in the IP address of your server. That is the 192.168.1.101 or whatever you chose earlier to be the server’s IP address. This will then route all your local networks name resolution requests to the Snow Leopard server, which will tell it what it knows (not much other than its own name) and then pass on the request to Google.

And now all the computers in your local network will be able to ‘see’ the server and use it for a backup device. The rest of the stuff you will need to know is fairly well documented in the Apple book and online. This one thing that turned out to be fairly simple to resolve about ate my lunch. I hope this post saves somebody some time.

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