Steve Maller Photography

As some of you readers may know, I used to be a software engineer, and I continue to dabble in the black arts on an as-needed basis. So while photographers may be interested in this post (although I sincerely doubt it), I am writing it for a different audience. You see, I spent (wasted, really) the better part of a day trying to solve a problem, and was amazed that my constant and diligent Google searches yield surprisingly little (no) help. So, if you’re looking for help configuring DNS on your OS X Server (Leopard 10.5.4 at the moment, but I suspect it’ll be relevant to other builds as well), you’ve come to the right place. Well, at least you’ve made it somewhere.

I have been migrating my old Linux router/server running on a 2-way Dell server to a quiet, nearly green Mac mini running OS X Leopard Server. I have been generally happy, although I finally cut over the last piece this past week and shut off the Linux server, and all hell broke loose. The last piece was DNS, and try as I might, I could not get my properly-delegated subnet to answer reverse DNS lookups. This ended up causing our email to Comcast, Yahoo, and others to start bouncing (they rightfully demand mail servers to answer with a proper reverse DNS lookup).

So, after screwing around with this problem all day, and getting nowhere (it’s DNS, for goodness’ sake…it’s been basically the same since the dawn of time!!!), I simply gave up.

I downloaded the BIND 9.5.0-P1 distro (source code), typed “configure”, “make” and “make install”. I then adjusted the OS X bind directories to go somewhere else, copied my Linux BIND config files onto the Mini, typed “named”, and lo and behold, it works.

I have no idea why Apple made the Leopard Server DNS stuff so painfully automatic…and wrong. If they’re selling a $1,000 server OS, they should not assume they’re dealing with newbies. Sigh.

Oh, and here’s a picture of my dog taken with a new 35/1.4 lens I just bought. =)

I was the official Facebook photographer for yesterday’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco. As part of the event, Mark Zuckerberg, the whiz-kid founder, delivered an interesting keynote address. Naturally, I got some wonderful photographs of him, and today he chose one of them to be his new Facebook “profile picture”. If you know what that means, then you know how prestigious that is. If you don’t, you’ll have to trust me.

In case you want to know what nine hours of photographing babies in my studio looks like, take a gander at this little slideshow…

Needless to say, my clients need to stay one step ahead of the various holiday and other seasonal fashion trends. So as odd as it is to be buying Halloween candy and measuring sizes of costumes in the middle of Summer, it actually makes sense. So I assembled over a dozen talented youngsters (including my niece Anna and nephew Ben) and did my level best to capture the spirit of all hallows’ eve. Here are a few highlights from the shoot.

Nancy and Paul’s eldest daughter Julia celebrated her bat mitzvah yesterday at Congregation Beth Jacob here in Redwood City. It was an exciting day, with much emotion, laughs and celebrating. I am, once again, grateful to have been invited to preserve Julia’s big simcha as a permanent family memory.

I had the opportunity to bring in some wonderful kids to do another baby fashion shoot. It was a tremendous success. I even had one baby fall asleep and we photographed her sleeping in a “nest” that we created for the shoot. How cool is that? Here’s a cute little compilation of all the photos I took that day. Enjoy!