Planning for your server

When you think about planning for your server installation, think about it like planning for a vacation. There a lot of analogies, right, there are a lot of similarities here. When you're planning a vacation, you can just throw the family in the car and get on the road and head in a direction and experience the adventure. And that's totally cool. You can do the same thing with the server. You can set it up, plug it in, get it going, turn things on, turn things off, experiment, break things, whatever you want to do, right? There's a valid reason to do that. Some people just love to get in and get their hands dirty and play.

If you're going to do something like that, I would recommend setting up your server on a small segregated test network if you will, a place where you're not going to disrupt other services on other servers or with other client machines, but you can get your hands dirty and you can get in there and play. On the other hand, if you're more of a planner, then whenever you go on vacation with the family, you probably know how many days you've got to go, you probably know where you want to stop, you probably know how much time you want to spend when you get each of these places, you've got a roadmap.

And that roadmap helps you to get more things done with your time. It's not for everybody. Not everybody is a planner. But if you are, I wanted to talk to you about a few things you should plan in advance. So the first thing I want you to think about when you're thinking about your server is who's going to use your server, what are they going to need, and are you going to be able to provide them with what they need by turning on a service on the server. There are a lot of services and going through this entire title with us, you're going to be able to see what the server has to offer.

And you'll be able to plan a little bit better. You're also going to want to know what you want to name your server. Have that domain name planned right upfront, know where it's going to be registered, have it registered before you start the setup of your server. Have it pointing to your AirPort. We're going to do that this way in this title. If you watch this linearly, you'll find that you're just going to flow from one thing into the next, and we did that on purpose. Similarly, you'll want to already know where you're going to get your SSL certificates from, what they're going to be called, and what kind of SSL certificate you're going to need to buy.

It's also a good idea to sort of plan financially for these things because it's not all free. Know these things ahead of time. They'll save you time when you're doing it in the process. Know the environment you're putting your server into. Certainly with the Mac mini Server, you can put it just about anywhere, next to a potted plant, no problem. But keep in mind, you don't want to be putting it underneath leaky pipes, you don't want to be putting on top of a heater. Those are extreme examples, but in a small office environment where space is limited, you might find that the only places that seem reasonable to put a server aren't the best places for a server.

For example, inside of a closet with no ventilation, the server is almost guaranteed to overheat, even something small and power efficient like the Mac mini Server. So be aware, you need to have proper cooling, it needs to be in a place where you can get to it. When you plug this thing in and plug it into the network and turn it on for the first time, be sure that you're setting your server up in the space and on the network where you intended to finally live. Changing the server's IP address after you finished setting it up or changing its name after you finish setting up is quite a big deal.

If you look at Apple's Help documentation, you'll see the many pages of information about the multiple services that are affected by a name or an IP address change and how each of those services is uniquely affected and how you'll have to try to reverse those processes. Apple gives you some interesting tools, actually a very friendly button in this new version, Lion Server, to fix that. But your mileage may vary; depending on the services that you have turned on, that change of IP or identity might not work as you expect it to. So try to have all of this planned out ahead of time so you don't have to make those changes later on.

Obviously, you're going to have to know the IP address, the subnet mask, the router address, you're going to have to know the numbers for your DNS servers, all of this network information. You have to have that fully qualified domain name really locked down. You've got to know what you want to name your server ahead of time. But if you have all of this information in your head or on pieces of paper in a nice organized plan, I think you'll have a much better experience when setting up your Lion Server.