Leopard Server: Bonjour-Based DNS A Performance No-No
Prior to moving into the new OpenRain office (announcement coming in June), we used OS X’s magical .local addressing to find all our servers. This allowed us to keep almost everything on DHCP, which is trivial to set up and administer. Little did we know, however, that this was being the root cause of many internal issues.
- General network I/O performance (file server access, OpenLDAP-based logins etc.) sucked. Simply using Server Admin or Workgroup Manager across the network would often take 5+ seconds to log in.
- Portable Home Directory (PHD) syncing, VPN and firewall services never seemed to work right, possibly due to nonequivalences between “server.example.com” and “server.local” in SSL and SSH. I’m not completely sure, but stuff broke in more ways than one.
Case in point: do not use bonjour-based DNS for your core network services. Use a proper DNS server from the start. DNS is a cornerstone dependency of all the other services provided by your Leopard server, so any performance issues you introduce at this level will carry through to your entire infrastructure.
Tags: apple, bonjour, dns, infrastructure, mac, network, performance, sucks
. 29 May 08 | Uncategorized | Comments (0)
Pictures: Costa Rican Landscapes
I recently returned from a week-long trip from Costa Rica. These are best frames from the trip and are intended for large format viewing. Flickr royally sucks at that (everything is shown low-res by default), but you can nab higher-def shots with a few clicks if you have a 24″+ monitor and would like to fill your screen.
Contact me privately if you’d like copies of the highest resolution RAW sources. (JPEG == Yucky.)
Tags: costa rica, flickr, picture, travel
. 23 May 08 | Uncategorized | Comment (1)
Cool Daily Links
- SearchMe.com :: Google search meets Apple’s “Cover Flow” for the web. Smells hot to me.Â
- iPhone SDK Gets Interface Builder :: Now it’s actually fun to learn about native iPhone application development.
- Upcoming Free iPhone Development Webcast
- Monoprice.com :: You need to buy your random cables from these folks. I started using them last year and couldn’t be more pleased with the price and quality of the CAT 6, DVI and FireWire cables. Shipping isn’t free, but it’s reasonable, and if you wait until you have $100 in needs before placing an order, well worth it.
Tags: apple, daily, iphone, news, retail
. 27 Mar 08 | Uncategorized | Comments (0)
Rails 2.0: selenium-on-rails routes.rb fix
When I updated a few projects to Rails 2.0 last year, selenium-on-rails stopped working … some issue with routing and the lame way selenium-on-rails adds its routes. I didn’t spend the time to figure out exactly what the routing problem was, but did manage to hack a quick fix into routes.rb. This feels like the Wrong Way for an ultimate fix but it at least solves the immediate problem. Shove these rules into your routes.rb and the /selenium path should start resolving again…
Tags: fix, rails, ror, ruby, selenium, selenium-on-rails, testing
. 12 Feb 08 | Uncategorized | Comments (0)
Welcomed To The RRoD Club, Part 2
The RRoD 360 repair process has been straightforward so far. (After all, Microsoft has certainly had an ample volume of opportunities to improve it.) The online repair form was straightforward, and my empty pre-paid shipping box arrived yesterday.
Everything needed to package the console for return was included: a plastic bag for the console, padded foam, large strip of packaging tape, shipping label, small form (in English and Spanish) and clearly written photographic instructions. Paying for door pickup would have been nice, but that’s not a big deal. I’m off to drop it off at UPS right now.
Tags: Games, microsoft, rrod, xbox 360
. 11 Jan 08 | Uncategorized | Comments (0)