If you aren’t lucky enough to have corporate servers that run AFP, you’ve probably had just about enough of the .DS_Store files that Mac OS X leaves lying around your Windows SMB and Linux NFS shares. While the files are turned off by default in Leopard, there are enough Tiger and Panther servers around to drive underfunded IT departments mad.

Let’s say you can’t figure out where some enormous application hides its licensing information, what system files are getting altered by a third-party installer, or even just where some non-standard preferences are getting squirreled away. There are lots of ways to distribute settings to multiple machines, but far fewer to determine what those settings are and how they’re stored. What you need is a way to see what files system changes are taking place. The easiest way is with FSEventer from fernLighting.

Last week in part one of this article, we learned how to configure a single OS X Server to provide DNS. This week, we’ll look at providing redundancy with a secondary DNS server and configure our client machines to receive our new DNS settings.

Without DNS, the domain name system that translates computer names to IP numbers, most networks would fall apart completely. As well as directing traffic on the internet, DNS is used for name-based routing in corporate environments, and especially for machines (like laptops) which can span the two. With Apple’s recent focus on URL-based protocols, and despite the popularity of LAN-based systems like Bonjour, the ability to configure internal DNS properly is an essential skill. In this two-part article, we’ll look at how to do just that.