You can now meet your tech reference book needs on the iPhone! O’Reilly media has published over a hundred of their books on the iPhone in cooperation with Lexcycle. And they’re way cheaper than their paper counterparts!! Check the App store for the cookbooks and pocket references we love.
Is this a sign of things to come? Hopefully well be seeing more reference and textbooks soon on the app store.
This has been working very well for me with Arch Linux on my netbook. Check that your flavor uses Grub before proceeding. This example tutorial uses a system with the following partition scheme:
Linux System Backup
Before backing up, it’s a good idea to put any relevant dotfiles into /etc/skel
also check that the system does not use uuid’s for rc.conf or menu.lst. If it does, you’ll have to correct those files manually (I leave it to you.)
now when you do this last step, remember that the mbr backup also backed up the partition table.
Restore a system
NOTE.1: i have duplicated effort by both restoring the mbr and then writing it with grub-install. this is not a mistake.
NOTE.2: how to format
ext2: mke2fs /dev/sdXX
ext3: mke2fs -j /dev/sdXX
swap: mkswap /dev/sdXX
fat16: mkdosfs -F 16 /dev/sdXX
fat32: mkdosfs -F 32 /dev/sdXX
Setting up the Music Player Daemon (MPD) can be easy and fast with a little help. Here’s what to do to get it going after installing it (with apt, emerge, pacman etc):
rm /etc/mpd.conf
(just in case)
vim /etc/mpd.conf
(put in it and change to suit)
music_directory “~/music”
playlist_directory “~/music/playlists”
db_file “~/.mpd/db”
log_file “~/.mpd/log”
error_file “~/.mpd/error”
pid_file “~/.mpd/mpd.pid”
state_file “~/.mpd/mpdstate”
user “youruser”
bind_to_address “127.0.0.1″
port “6600″
(save it and close)
mkdir ~/music
mkdir ~/music/playlists
(if you need to)
touch ~/.mpd/mpd.pid
mpd –create-db
(if this doesn’t work, check the user in mpd.conf)
mpd
To get it to run on bootup: (for Arch linux)
add mpd to /etc/rc.conf to have it on boot up.
(in the DAEMONS line)
Ready for a quick setup of DNS server bind on OS X? Here we go! You need admin access rights to do this, so to make it easy, I suggest you do all the file editing in the terminal with vi or pico. This guide is best for a one domain, one IP setup, although it is true for any configuration with some changes. Use this guide if you know nothing about DNS and want to set things up quick or if you know what you’re doing and need to know which files OS X is using. ….not valid for Leopard Server!
Add a foward zone for each do main, like this. The zone is the name of the domain you want to host and the file is what file will have to domain’s configuration in it. You need one for each domain you’re hosting. 
Add a reverse zone for each IP subnet which will be used for the domains.Set the zone to the first three digit groups of the subnet, backwards. So, 192.168.0.x will be written 0.168.192. I know, it’s a little weird. In both the foward and reverse files, what file name you choose is really arbitrary. You just have to be consistent. The files themselves will be in /var/named.
// // Include keys file // include "/etc/rndc.key"; // Declares control channels to be used by the rndc utility. // // It is recommended that 127.0.0.1 be the only address used. // This also allows non-privileged users on the local host to manage // your name server. // // Default controls // controls { inet 127.0.0.1 port 54 allow {any;} keys { "rndc-key"; }; }; options { directory "/var/named"; /* * If there is a firewall between you and nameservers you want * to talk to, you might need to uncomment the query-source * directive below. Previous versions of BIND always asked * questions using port 53, but BIND 8.1 uses an unprivileged * port by default. */ // query-source address * port 53; }; // // a caching only nameserver config // zone "." IN { type hint; file "named.ca"; }; zone "localhost" IN { type master; file "localhost.zone"; allow-update { none; }; }; zone "0.0.127.in-addr.arpa" IN { type master; file "named.local"; allow-update { none; }; }; zone "kiwimod.com" IN { type master; file "named.kiwimod.com"; }; zone "129.234.60.in-addr.arpa" IN { type master; file "named.129.234.60"; allow-update { none; }; }; logging { category default { _default_log; }; channel _default_log { file "/Library/Logs/named.log"; severity info; print-time yes; }; };
; DNS for KiwiMod.com $TTL 86400 ; 1 day kiwimod.com. IN SOA ns.kiwimod.com. admin.kiwimod.com. ( 2003040101 ; Serial 10800 ; Refresh after 3 hours 3600 ; Retry after 1 hour 604800 ; Expire after 1 week 86400 ) ; Minimum TTL of 1 day ; name servers @ IN NS ns.kiwimod.com. @ IN MX 10 mail.kiwimod.com. ; host to address mappings @ IN A 60.234.129.2 mail IN A 60.234.129.2 ns IN A 60.234.129.2 ; aliases www IN CNAME mail amy IN CNAME mail
; Reverse lookup for 60.234.129.2 $TTL 86400 ; 1 day 129.234.60.in-addr.arpa IN SOA ns.kiwimod.com. root.kiwimod.com. ( 2003040101 ; Serial 10800 ; Refresh after 3 hours 3600 ; Retry after 1 hour 604800 ; Expire after 1 week 86400 ) ; Minimum TTL of 1 day ; name servers 129.234.60.in-addr.arpa IN NS ns.kiwimod.com. ; address to host mappings 2 IN PTR kiwimod.com. 2 IN PTR ns.kiwimod.com. 2 IN PTR mail.kiwimod.com.
That’s it. All you have to do now is start up named and see if it worked.
In the terminal, type:
sudo named -c /etc/named.conf
to start up the nameserver. To see if the name is resolving, try digging it:
dig kiwimod.com
or
dig 192.168.your.IP
Use your own IP of course, the IP of the server that is. You should get back some information about the server, like what IP the nameserver has. If not, then something has gone horribly wrong!
This is part one to setting up a basic, all-in-one server under Mac OS X. We’re going to investigate how the Mac stacks up as a server in setup and customization. For the most part, I’m going to assume you’ve either heard about or tinkered with these tools in some other *nix before.
( Skip to Quick Setup Guide! )
Let’s use an example setup. You have one computer, a mac, that you want to run apache and maybe some other services on. You also want to host your own domain. You’re probably going to want to decide how the domain is going to be organized ahead of time. This makes things a lot easier when you go to setup the actual domain structure in BIND. But lets get down to some basics about DNS first.
About DNS
In order for networked computers to translate between a shortcut name, like google.com, and a real IP address, they have to contact a Domain Name Server. DNS servers keep a list of what computer names are associated with what address. There is a lot (a lot!) more to know about DNS than this, so I refer you to the info list at the bottom for more. Ok, so how do we do this?
What you need
Putting it together, an example
Our example is an all-in-one web, mail, and dns server. We’re going to call it kiwimod.com. OS X comes with the DNS server application, Bind, already installed and ready. (Bind and Named, pronounced name-d, are two names for one service.) We just have to add some information to the configure files to be off and running. Take a look at /etc/named.conf
Named.conf has the information about what domains your site is running and what files contain the configuration settings. In this file what you have to do is add a zone for each domain and each IP address your going to setup. Let’s use our example domain, kiwimod.com.
Continue to the DNS setup guide…
Running the daemon
Once you’re satisfied with your setup you want to make sure Bind starts up whenever your computer does. To do this, you need to add a startup script to your mac’s startup items. We’ll cover that in another guide. See you next time!
