Let’s begin by selecting DNS on the “Computer & Services” list under your server. Under the Zones tab, select the “+” button to add a new zone for your domain.

• In the Zone Name field, add your domain followed by a period. For this tutorial, I’ve used “yourdomain.com” for every example. Naturally, you’ll replace that with you own domain.
• Remember to add a period after your domain (ex. - yourdomain.com.). This indicates that your domain is a Fully Qualified Server Name (FQSN).
• In the Server Name field, create a name for your server. For this example, I named it “nameserver” since my server is running DNS. You can name it however you think is appropriate for your server. Keep in mind that for the rest of the tutorial, I’ll consistently use “nameserver” for my examples, but you’ll have to replace that with the one you created in this DNS tutorial.
• Your Server IP address should appear automatically.
• You may also want to provide admin email.

• Click the Machines tab and select your newly created zone. Press the “/” button.

• To add Aliases, press the “+” button and put as many aliases as you like for your server. As you can see, I added aliases for other services that will be enabled later like smtp for mail.

• Select the check box for “This machine is a mail server for the zone” if you want to use your server for mail services. This will create an MX “Mail Exchange” record automatically for other DNS servers on the outside (WAN, like the Internet) that will use the information to deliver your mail to the correct server.
• In the Mail Server Precedence field, using a lower number like zero means higher precedence. Why is it inverse? I have no idea.
• Click the General tab. Where it says Allow, make sure both boxes for Zone Transfer and Recursion is checked.
• If you’d like to add more machines, get the IP info, supply a name within this zone and repeat the process.

• Press the green “Start Service” button on the top right of the panel to start your DNS service.
• Now you’ll need to open up Network Preference and click the tab for TCP/IP for your ethernet settings.
• In the DNS servers field, put in the IP of your server since you’re now running DNS services on it.
• In the Search Domain field, put in your domain.

You’ll have to use the same information and supply it to your other computers on the network under its Network Preferences for it to recognize your DNS server.

To see your DNS server in action, go to another Mac on your network and launch the Network Utility in the Utility folder. Select the Ping tab and type in your newly created relative domain name for your server. Press the ping button and if all is well, you should get a response with the appropriate IP address.

In this example, I would put in “nameserver.yourdomain.com” and it should ping back with an IP adddress of 192.168.1.100.

Setting up DHCP

I would guess that most of you are already running DHCP from your router to assign IPs automatically to computers and devices on the network. This may be fine for your needs and you may opt not to enable OS X Server’s DHCP service. If so, you can skip this section of the tutorial.

There may be situations where you want to run additional DHCP servers, but that’s usually found in larger networks for fault tolerance purposes.

With that said, it’s a pretty straight forward process to set up in case you’re interested.

• Select DHCP under Computer & Services for your server. Click on the Settings tab and press the “+” button on the bottom to add a subnet.

• Provide a name for your subnet.
• Fill in the fields for starting and ending IP addresses for the range of IPs that you’ll be using. Obviously, the range would depend on the number of machines connected within the subnet.
• Fill in the Subnet Mask. This is ususally 255.255.255.0
• Leave Network Interfave on en0.
• Provide your router’s IP address.
• Lease time determines how long an IP will last before a new one is assigned.
• Save your setting.

• Click on the DNS tab. For Default Domain, provide your own domain.
• For Name Servers, provide the IP of your DNS server, which was set up earlier in this lesson.
• Save your settings.

I’ll bring up LDAP settings again after the Open Directories lesson. For now, you can leave it as is.

Now that you’re finished setting up the DHCP server, enable it by pressing the Start Service button.

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