New leopard server user

[pvmacguy]

Hey guys I got my old powermac G5 back from my dad and am going to use it for a little backup server for my mac mini and macbook pro. As well as have all my music, movies etc.

I have a 1tb external HDD hooked up to the firewire port on the machine, my two other systems recognize G5server in Finder and there are public folders I can access after I log into each user account I created for each machine on the server. I was able to get my VPN working so I can remotely access the system while out an about.

Last thing I need to do is get my Macbook Pro and Mini to time machine backup to the server. I have the server backing up to the 1tb drive and want the other two as well. Time machine on the server is recognizing the drive, but on the other two when I click "choose drive" neither internal or external show up that are on the server.

Any advise from users is very appreciated!

 

[mmomega]

Still working on my new SLServer myself so I'm somewhat in the same boat as you are. That being said I came across another site that goes into plenty of detail about damn near every aspect of setting up an apple server.

http://www.afp548.com/forum/index.php?forum=25 - file sharing forums

Hope some of this helps.

 

[pvmacguy]

Awesome thank you! From what it seems is that the external hard drive isnt setup to be shared. I couldn't find a way to make it that way so ended up for now using a program called itimemachine and it allows me to choose one of the already public folders on the main hard drive to back up to.

 

[mmomega]

I had this problem as well but I had clicked to share the drive but the entire drive wouldn't show up under any other computers. If I shared a particular folder within the drive then it would show up.

Not sure exactly where the problem lies; from other posts on afp58 it seems like I /we may have a DNS issue but I could be wrong.

 

[pvmacguy]

Alright I was finally able to get mine all strait. Dummy me couldn't figure out how to get the drive to be shared. Had a total face palm moment lol. Right clicked and clicked share drive. Then added the users I wanted to be able to read/write to the drive. On my client machines installed this then ran the program and when I opened time machine and clicked choose drive huzah! There was my 1tb external drive there ready to be backed up on. Hope this helps you out.

 

[pvmacguy]

Maybe someone can help me out with this, I setup the vpn on my server at home when at work today, tried to connect to my vpn on the server to access some stuff but vpn won't connect and it says cannot contact server. Any ideas? When I was home last night vpn would connect just fine.

 

[calderone]

Are you trying to connect via hostname or IP address? Here are some details for both scenarios:

IP Address:
1. You need to know your external IP address, go to this site on a machine on your local network:
http://www.networksecuritytoolkit.org/nst/cgi-bin/ip.cgi

2. You need to forward the necessary ports on your router to the VPN server. This will sometimes depend on the VPN server settings. Check your documentation for these.

Hostname:
1. Your hostname (Domain Name), by default means nothing on the internet if there are no nameservers with a record for it.

2. You need to add your desired hostname to a nameserver somewhere. Your ISP, your webhost, etc. You want an A record for server.example.com pointing to your external IP.

3. If you have a static IP from your ISP (typical business accounts), you are done. If you have a dynamic IP (typical consumer accounts) then you will need update this record somehow. This could be via a launchagent or the most common way:

4. Use a dynamic DNS service like Dyndns, you can use this exclusively if you do not own a domain or you can create a cname (alias) from mydyn.dyndns.org to server.example.com

5. Once this is done, you will still need to perform step 2 as your router still has to know where to send this traffic.

*Note* This assumes that you are running VPN on a machine inside your network.


The point, you have to use information that can be understand across the internet. A local computer name is not understand unless there is a record for it on the internet.

 

[pvmacguy]

Thank you for all the information, I'm still trying to digest and process the information you provided me as I'm pretty new to the whole sever thing. Which would be the easiest way do you think to achieve what I'm trying to do. It will just be for two of my machines to connect to and send time machine backups to as well as from my laptop access the server from anywhere to get files and other things off of it. Don't really want to look at tons of extra cost. Option 1 seemed like maybe the easiest most cost free? Thanks again!

 

[calderone]

The IP method is free, however, if your IP address were to change you would be out of luck unless you had something updating your IP somewhere.

dyndns is also free. I forget to mention that with dyndns, there is a widget that runs in the background to make sure that your hostname stays up to date with your IP.

It sounds like you may want to go with dyndns, that way if your IP changes you won't be in for a surprise when you try to connect and are unable to connect.

Here is a pretty decent guide; http://lifehacker.com/124804/geek-to-live--how-to-assign-a-domain-name-to-your-home-web-server

 

[pvmacguy]

Thank you very much!! Just one more question I used dyndns and got that all setup and setup the information on the wireless router since my sever is going through that.

Now onto the question. How do I change my DNS on osx server to the one that I created? Right now under server preferences it says G5server.local is the DNS name. How can that be changed? Thanks again!