Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™ Server For Dummies®

Chapter 20. Ten Cool Things That Didn't Make It into the Book

In This Chapter

• Working with round robin DNS

• Putting users' home folders on the server

• Working from the command line

• Changing server names

• Clustering your mail services

• Stopping Macs from losing Active Directory binding

• Uncovering Ruby on Rails and Server Admin

• Making the server auto-restart

• Getting help at Apple.com

One of the difficult things about writing this book was deciding which of Snow Leopard Server's many aspects didn't fit in the 400-plus pages. Some features are cool but obscure; others just don't fit in with the other topics. So, in this chapter, I want to squeeze in a few more useful bits, in no particular order. Some of these are simple things that anyone can use — others are pretty technical. But they're all pretty cool.

One Site, Multiple Macs with Round Robin DNS

Say you have a Mac mini serving a Web site, but the site is getting popular, and the mini can't handle the traffic. You could drop three or four grand on Mac Pro or Xserve. Or, you could add a few more Mac mini's to share the load of the single Web site.

Tip

You can do this by using the round robin DNS technique. Snow Leopard Server's DNS service allows you to set up a pool of IP addresses for a single domain name. Snow Leopard Server's DNS service (or any BIND-compliant DNS server) cycles these IP addresses when asked for the domain name. You can mirror the Web content on four Mac minis, each with a different IP address, but with the same domain name, say ...