Wormbog

I installed my first virtual machine instance of Snow Leopard server last week to start playing around with the OS and see how it’s wiki service worked.  The server installed without any issue on Parallels Server and I was quickly up and running.  After a little digging around I discovered that I could get out on the network with no problem, as long as I was using an IP address.  DNS was not working.  I don’t remember telling the server during the setup that I wanted it to be a DNS server but it seems to assume that it should have that role.  I first saw signs that it had done this when looking in the network configuration and seeing the first DNS server set to its loopback address, 127.0.0.1, followed by our local DNS server addresses.  I removed the loopback entry but still had no luck resolving names.  I jumped into terminal and ran nslookup and it was attempting to resolve names to 127.0.0.1 still.  I flushed the DNS cache using dscacheutil -flushcache, rebooted and still had no luck.

I then went to Server Admin and noticed that the DNS service was running.  I stopped the service and tried pinging again.  Same symptoms.  I could get to IP addresses but was not resolving host names.  Next I went back to Server Admin and the DNS configuration.  I removed all the entries under the Zones section.  That seemed to be the fix.

It is frustrating that this service starts without being the user selecting it during the configuration.  What is even more frustrating is that even though the service is stopped the information in the Zones configuration still impacts the ability of the server to resolve names.  I have always struggled with OS X server’s implementation of DNS but this is the most trouble I have ever had.

Now off to work on the wiki.  I’ll let you know how it goes in a later post.

Update: After posting this I went back to clean up the server configuration and am back to having the same issue.  I’ll post back when I figure out what is causing this.

After digging a little further it seemed like the problem came back when I added a second network interface.  The second interface had a public IP and became the default gateway.  I removed the default gateway from the private address but left the DNS address and DNS suffix on the private address.  In this configuration the server could not resolve DNS queries.  I moved the DNS servers addresses and the DNS suffix to the public IP NIC and it is now working.