Freezing Frontier (Was: Apple Rackmounts)

[David Stodolsky]

>On Thu, 16 May 2002 22:46:07 +0200, David Stodolsky
><david.stodolsky at socialinformatics.org> said:
>
>>Strange things can happen if DNS is unavailable to OSX.
>>
>>Even with DNS, there is a know bug in the OSX loopback interface. In one
>>case, I found the loopback address, 127.0.0.1, dead. In IE, however, the
>>address localhost worked (at least once). In Omniweb, that address was dead.
>>
>>Somebody at Apple suggested a DNS entry like "localhost.example.com," as
>>well as the standard "localhost," might be wise.
>>
>>Setting the inverse (PTR) records is also important with OSX.
>
>How do I do that stuff? Thx. m.
>--

DNS is a *big* topic. The Liu book, DNS and BIND, O'Reilly Press is the
definitive ref.
www.oreilly.com/catalog/dns4/

However, there are numerous How To's around the Net, including one in the
Apple's Knowledge Base for OSXS. With OSX, things can get complicated,
since DNS info can appear in 4 different places with OSXS:
hosts file
Netinfo database
Server Admin - tweeks an XML file someplace that is used at startup
DNS - BIND Domain Name Server

If you get this right, the system, as of 10.1.3, will still throw errors
(Lookupd - DNS timed out) from time to time.

For a quick fix, download The Moose's Assistant, which will eliminate
editing of the hosts file with a text editor. However, you still have to
know what you are doing. If you have an old Mac on your network running
System 7, you can grab MacDNS, which is probably the easiest freely
available solution. It will not handle some longer DNS records, however.


dss
-- 
David S. Stodolsky, PhD    PGP: 0x35490763    david.stodolsky at ddf.dk