Wormbog » OS X

Slow FTP on OSX 10.6 Server

mvonhof — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:33:42 +0000

I have been struggling with a sluggish FTP server on OS X 10.6. The server configuration seemed simple enough. After following the setup instructions in Apple’s Documentation(PDF) I was able to get the server to authenticate users and to send them to the correct directory. The users could log in but directory listing took 3-4 minutes to respond and most FTP clients would timeout. After some searching and trial and error I found that with the firewall turned off the issue was resolved. I found this document on Apple’s Support page that details how to define the passive ports in the ftpaccess file. Very simple solution, if only I had come across it a couple of hours ago.

RDP on Mac Licensing Issues

mvonhof — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:04:35 +0000

We recently ran into an issue with connecting Mac’s to the Microsoft Terminal Server. The terminal server was installed with a temporary license while we tested it. Over Christmas break licenses were installed and the Windows and Linux machines had no trouble getting a license. Some (not most) of our Mac clients did not get an updated license. We would get the error:

You were disconnected from the windows-based computer because of problems during the licensing protocol

I was pointed in the general direction of a solution here. After deleting the contents of /users/Shared/Microsoft/RDC Crucial Server Information/ I still got the same error message. I went to a Mac that was working and copied the contents of said folder to the Mac that was not working. This fixed the problem.

(I also tried to reinstall Remote Desktop but still got the same error)

Snow Leopard Server DNS

mvonhof — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:55:25 +0000

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.