| Mac@Work The Ultimate Business Machine
Sivasothi.com? by: Bernard Teo 
Back to weblog: Disclaimer 1 : This is easiest to set up by people who connect their Macs to the cable modem directly. It is a bit harder to do if you are sharing the connection, say, with Airport Base Station.
Copyright © 2003
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Your Mac, a First-Class Citizen on the Internet Even if you connect to the Internet via a cable modem, whereby your Internet address comes from a floating pool and changes ever so often, you can still associate your Mac with a fixed domain name that people can use to look you up, eg., FamilyIBook@homedns.org, or Sivasothi.com, no less. (My apologies to the Otterman but that domain name does have a nice ring.) There are many advantages to doing this. For a start, you can bring your system wherever you go and people can look you up in a consistent way. Say, somebody has learnt to drop stuff into your shared folder at FamilyIBook@homedns.org. You can unplug your system, switch locations (say, to another home) and your friend will still be able to find you at your new location, just by following FamilyIBook@homedns.org. It's easy to set up. Once you succeed in doing this, you may start to see further possiblities. (For business use, this is absolutely priceless as part of a disaster recovery strategy, if you think about it.) How It Works One . You need a friendly, human-readable host name to give to your OSX-based Mac. You can get a free host name by registering with DynDNS.org. Registering means getting a User-ID and password and, of course, a host name from DynDNS.org. Two. You need this to be managed by a system (called a Domain Name Server) that allows itself to be automatically updated every time your machine gets a new machine-readable internet address (IP address). DynDNS.org, itself, provides such a mechanism; hence its name. When you get a host name from them, it is automatically tracked by their system.
Three. You need a program running on your Mac that knows how to tell the DynDNS.org server that your IP address has changed. This program is DNSUpdate. You download this, copy it to the Applications folder, launch it, and provide it with your User-ID and password at DynDNS.org so that it can log on on your behalf. You also tell DNSUpdate the host name it is responsible for updating. So however often your IP address changes and as soon as it does, DNSUpdate will do all the right things. People who come looking for you via your host name will always find you. Guaranteed. Not bad for free stuff. How To Test If It Works Turn on OSX's built-in Apache WebServer using the Sharing Pane in Systems Preferences. Check if the web server is running before doing Steps 1 to 3 above. You do this using Safari by typing "localhost" into the URL (search internet address) field. If the web server is running, you will see the Apache default web page, or your own web pages if you have already updated them. Then do Steps 1 to 3. Get a friend to hit your web pages using the host name you obtained from DynDNS.org. If you need a custom host name, like myCompany.com, you can buy one from any registrar, say Dotster.com. Then you register this with DynDNS.org, for a fee. Finally you tell Dotster.com that your host name is managed by DynDNS.org. Now, So What? Well, you can now run a dozen things on that Mac. A weblog, a discussion group, your own mail server. SendMail, PHP, Perl, Java, WebDAV. It's endless. The applications that are built into every plain-vanilla Mac are respectable first-class web applications. They're steady and powerful. And they're now ours to use, too. We ought to use them well because there are little things on the Mac that makes doing IT fun again. |
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Contact : Bernard Teo |
