I finally got windows DNS up and running on my Windows Home Server after putting it off for a year or so.   It seems trivial, but I view it as one more configuration item to recreate after a rebuild.   I hope that my current WHS lasts about forever (I built it with 3 to 5 years in mind) but the system drive could always fail – not to mention that WHS2 should be out before too long.  Once WHS is 64 bit, I’ll consolidate my main VMware Server instance onto it and it will be nice to be down to basically one server in the house.

Anyway, I had a couple challenges, but mostly those were due to configurations across my two networks (one behind the G router, the other behind the N router.)  The long term solution is to flip both of those into AP mode and do all my configuration on the SMC gateway but that is an undertaking for another day.  The other was related to flushing the dns cache on the DNS server itself.  Seems obvious, right?  Well, I wasted about twenty minutes before I caught on to it.

I switched over to OpenDNS for my external DNS servers and that seems to have sped up internet browsing a touch.

The last thing to do is to have DHCP append a domain (so atlas will be atlas.jhome) to PC’s and then setup a zone for that on my DNS server.  That way name resolution will be tidier and I can setup reverse zones and such.

And the next last thing to do is to setup another windows host for dns so I don’t have to worry about maitnenance activities upsetting our LAN and internet access.

It just never ends!

–Nat

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3638

Pretty excited about these little guys.  Now even ~$400 PC builds don’t have to compromise with regards to the number of cores you get.  Drop this on a ~$50-$90 motherboard and you’ll get a really good experience for not much dough.  Some games don’t run the fastest on this CPU as stated in Anands’ article, but performance is quite acceptable.  Realistically, AMD owns the cheap (~$40), decent (~$65) and reasonable (~$100) price points at this juncture.  Clearly Intel takes the lead once you start getting around $200 for the CPU alone, but the platform costs will also be significantly higher.

It will be interesting to see how quickly bios updates roll out (if they are even needed…), but other than that it seems a pretty clear winner.

At the very least, it is another reason to be happy that AMD is still in the game.

–Nat

http://www.jonathanmoeller.com/screed/?p=235

That’s the link I used to make this happen.  Of course, I would suggest using nano to edit the wp-config.php file, that’s about the only thing different that I had to do.

I would also suggest using Server 8.04 instead of desktop if you are looking to setup a dedicated wordpress box.   There isn’t a good reason to use the full-up desktop install for this.   On top of the wordpress LAMP requirement, I would definitely install openssh.  The other handy software install I did was webmin: http://ict-freak.nl/2009/02/18/how-to-install-webmin-on-ubuntu-804/ and this gives a great overview of what is going on.

–Nat

Figuring out how to get WordPress functional not only on the internet but in my house has been frustrating.  One of the main issues is that WordPress is required to know its path (https://teamjuchems.com/wordpress, for example) and will always redirect client access to that name.

This doesn’t sound like a biggy, but it becomes an major annoyance when your gateway device refuses to loopback your internal requests.  This happens because the world DNS servers hand you back your external IP address and your gateway device says “hey, that’s right here!” and parks your browser.  And just like that you can’t get to any of your self-hosted websites from inside your house.

This is particularly annoying with a blog.

One answer is to setup DNS inside your home so that you use as an authoritative source for your internal websites.  Bind and MS DNS both work and depending on your resources are free/cheap.  I’ll be setting MS DNS shortly, but I’d also like to see what I can get running on Linux – that’ll present a more of a learning opportunity.

As far as solving the internal resolution issue, this allows for computers in the house to use the internal 192 address while allowing for world users to hit the external IP while keeping WordPress happy.

A good future blog post might a walk through on hosting a website from your house.  I am sure its been done a thousand times before, but it sounds like a good challenge.  Pretty soon I am going to need to figure out how to backup the mysql database for this blog.  If I lost it now, I would probably let this whole project die…

–Nat