Jeff’s Place

I just had to upgrade the Mac server which I had previously set up as a NIS/Automount client, and found that suddenly automount no longer works right. It looks like this is genuinely broken in the new automountd, but of course I can’t tell for sure without source code access.

In an earlier post I detailed how to set up a Leopard server as a NIS client with automount. That procedure required editing a couple files in the /etc/ directory. The upgrade to Snow Leopard replaced those files (auto_master and autofs.conf) with new files, wiping out my changes. It should be easy enough to just put the changes back, right? Wrong.

Continue reading ‘Mac OS-X Snow Leopard breaks NIS Automount’ »

Many companies use NIS to distribute authentication data (username/password, group, etc) along with automount maps to make networks of servers all authenticate and mount shared NFS drives uniformly. I’ve built hundreds of these networks, often mixing linux, solaris, bsd, and usually a few windows systems. I recently was asked to set up a Mac XServe box on a network of Linux and Solaris machines, and integrate it to work alongside them. At first this was a bit baffling, and there was really very little useful info on the net for how to do this, but I eventually figured it out and it wasn’t that hard in the end. I have very little recent Mac experience so maybe someone more familiar with the Mac would have found this to be simple but I suspect there are really very few people around with recent Mac server experience outside of Apple itself.
Continue reading ‘Mac OS-X Server as a NIS Client with Automount’ »

From time to time I have to make serial connector adapters to get from DB9 to RJ45. Many devices (cisco, lantronix, etc.) use RJ45 connections for serial ports, many others use DB9 connections. This simple pinout works with an RJ45/DB9 connector to make the connection, these connectors are available at any decent electronics shop for about $3, you just have to push the pins into the right holes. The sweet thing about this is you can pick straight or null-modem by using either a straight cable or a telco-roll cable (not ethernet roll, telco-roll reverses all the conductors and usually is used with flat satin cable, just flip the cable over before putting on the rj45 head so on one end blue is on the left, on the other end white is on the left).

DB9 Pin -> Color -> Signal

1 -> Orange -> DCD

2 -> Black -> RX

3 -> Yellow -> TX

4 -> Brown -> DTR

5 -> Red -> SGND

6 -> no connection

7 -> White -> RTS

8 -> Blue -> CTS

9 -> no connection

- -> Green -> no connection