Initial Setup of Snow Leopard Server

[Mulan]

I have just created my company and I bought myself a MacMini Server with SL Server. I want some help from your side about the setup of Snow Leopard Server. Exactly, I administer several xserver. But you should still be the same if the Apple docs exist, they tend to throw you the information without any explanation of why and how. So hoping some help from you guys out there as early as possible.!!

[Lillebror]

I would like to explain some basic steps that you that would be useful before doing the setup. To put us in a small company you choose the Mac mini as a server machine and the iMac as client machines. Access to Internet when it will be managed by any box ISP. By helping you documentation of the box in question, make sure that the DHCP server has the IP in excluded and choose a fixed IP as your server. The goal is to provide your users all the necessary collaborative services such as sharing calendar or address book, or even remote access to your business. Through this remote access you will need a valid domain name.

[Calvin K]

If you later want to provide opportunities for remote access you will get closer to the body that manages your domain name so they know that "demo.inig-servces.com" and "*. demo.inig -services.com "should be redirected to your public IP address (if you do not have a fixed IP address, they will have to go through an intermediary such as dyndns). The domain name is the key to your Internet communication, is your online identity! With a clear impact on the ranking in search engines, your domain name should be catchy and easy to write, including generic keywords and mnemonic of your activity.

[Solomon]

If you have already installed Mac OS X Client you will not be too homesick. The following are the steps for doing an initial setup of Snow Leopard Server :

1. First you must choose language.
2. Once on the welcome sign you will notice the menu bar at the top of your screen. The installation DVD of Mac OS X is nothing but a Live CD, you will find in the Utilities menu different tools such as Disk Utility or Utility password recovery.
3. And right next to the Window menu you can access the log of installation, allowing you to see what could be a problem if the installation is a failure.
4. You will notice the popup menu in the top left of the window allowing you to filter the log contained in the type of message, then you will have to read it and accepted the license you must choose a target disk.
5. You will notice the Customize button in the lower left of the window by clicking on it you can choose the system components to be installed.
6. At this level, you're the only master of your needs, but remember that this is a server system.

If something failed during installation you will have here another message with a yellow triangle instead, in this case you should advise and read the logs.

[Dr. V]

Regarding the provision of "sharing" address book OS X Server 10.6 should be careful because it is only intended for information sharing between machines and not between users. To quote Apple: "With the new Address Book Server in Snow Leopard Server, it's incredibly easy to access and synchronize contacts across multiple computers and the devices you own." Regarding the use of DNS, we must understand how the split DNS, you have an internal management of the DNS with Private IP management and external redirects domain name to your public IP. These are two separate feature.

[Warner]

Regarding the provision of "sharing" address book OS X Server 10.6 should be careful because it is only intended for information sharing between machines and not between users. To quote Apple: "With the new Address Book Server in Snow Leopard Server, it's incredibly easy to access and synchronize contacts across multiple computers and the devices you own". The underlying information here is that the service AdressBook Server is expected to share information with multiple users on one machine (like MobileMe) but unfortunately do not share between users with different rights of access.

[Vitus]

Regarding the use of DNS, we must understand how the split DNS, you have an internal management of the DNS with Private IP management and external redirects office.gobidomain.com to your public IP. These are two separate feature. Internally we must therefore think of telling your client machine the IP address of your server as a DNS server and not the IP from your ISP, so that the internal DNS resolution is done properly (and do not forget the configuration of DNS relay server-level access to the rest of the world is functional). It will also add office.gobidomain.com in field research to client machines. From everything should work. Regarding remote access, the only configuration to do is port forwarding from the router to your server.