Firstly… FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name)

I can’t stress this enough! Get yourself a static IP for your machine and make sure your domain name resolves correctly to that IP both Forward and Reverse! You can check this with…

dig <your.domain.name>

and

dig -x <yourip>

it’s also helpful to check

scutil --get HostName

Here’s a very important point. If you, like me, use a ADSL router that uses internal IP addressing instead of acting as a ‘dumb’ ADSL modem and you want to use XGrid, you’re going to run into what they call the Double NAT situation. This can cause havoc for a newbie because Bonjour can get confused with where .local addresses belong.

In my setup my router has the address 10.1.1.1 internally and I have 3 static IP addresses. I used to have the WAN IPs use port forwarding to connect the WAN IP to the LAN IP for each machine. By adding the Mini I’ve added another ‘layer’ of Network Address Translation whereby the “local” machines are actually on the subnet 192.168.1.1 This is exactly what you need for Xgrid and Open Directory to work correctly but it can cause a nightmare if you want remote access to machines on your 192-subnet. The answer is to use the “Gateway Setup Assistant” and designate one interface as your WAN port and another as your LAN port. This creates all the DHCP, NAT, VPN and Firewall settings you’ll need to get things working properly.

I’ve got my external IP correctly resolving to my domain name and my domain name correctly resolving to my external IP. Don’t enter your external IP address in the Zone for your machine in the domain name settings until this is correctly configured! (Allow the usual 2 days for changes to take effect)

Choose your DN carefully!

Do not under any circumstances try to change your mind about the domain name of your server without reinstalling SL first. You can do it, by using the wonderful…

 sudo changeip

command, but you’re opening yourself up to a world of hurt with Kerberos and authentication issues because some settings just don’t get overwritten. (I’m looking at you PodcastProducer!)

Check the DNS, LDAP and DHCP settings in the DHCP Server section of Server Admin regularly if you use command line tools. It seems to me the server drops settings when you use command line tools or Setup assistants. It’s not rocket science to figure out but it is one of those annoying features.

Create a copy of your SL disc on an external drive first!

No DVD drive makes more room for hard drives but makes installing a pain. Apples recommends this, so do I. It’s actually a really big time saver. Especially if your copying a stack of files from a previous machine on to your server  your going to want to verify/repair your drives and fix file permissions.