Leopard is a pain, but I still like it

[SleePy]

As most of you know I use a Mac. I develop everything from my macs. So it may come to no surprise that when Apple released their new Leopard system recently, I went to the Apple Online Store and acquired mine for $10 (Due to having made a macbook purchase recently I was able to get this at a low cost).

Well the upgrade was cool and the background was neat. The nice toolbar along the top changed. I was very impressed with how it looked. I became even more impressed after the upgrade was complete and I could login again. The features that Apple has put in Leopard really are outstanding to say the least, it really amazes me.

Well sadly, I get disappointed soon after. Currently I emulate this site and others running on the dedicated server by setting up the /home directory on my mac and then the accounts, then using the hosts file I point .test domains to my mac again. And finally in apache setup I using virtual hosts I correctly point the domains. This is very similar to how cpanel itself works to setup sites.

To my surprise the /home folder was empty, in fact it was a alias (symlink/shortcut) to another drive that was empty and locked. This really set me off. After some work I found out my home directory still existed, So I rescued it with some command lines via the upgrade disk and dropped it in my user folder.

After much more work I was finally able to figure it out why /home was another drive. It seems apple set this up for some reason on bootup. Well I also figured out that this was setup from a file in /etc called "auto_master" and its slave process "auto_home".

So after manually editing the auto_master myself and saving the changes, I had set it up to instead of using "/home" to actually use "/home/user". This was very simple process, Like most people editing these types of plain text files are very easy (as well as easy to screw up).

I took a chance and rebooted my macbook pro. Well to my joy, It was using /home/user to point to the empty untouchable drive. I edited the permissions on /home since the bootup created it so I could edit it and dropped files in it. After another reboot I saw the files still existed which makes me happy.

So after returning the files I was able to boot apache up with "sudo /home/apache/bin/apachectl start" and only recieved a minor error which doesn't seem to affect apache's startup. But yet, my .test domains where not working yet.

So back to google for more research I find out that Apple decided to remove "NetInfo.app" from the "/Applications/Utilities" folder. This was a slight set back as I had used this application to point domains to my computer.

Again, thanks to google I was able to find out how to setup My mac to use flat file database for domain lookups before it trys a dns server for the information. Thankfully that worked and I was able to manually edit my "/etc/hosts" file and point my test domains to my computer again. So a final reboot to ensure it worked, I am finally able to use my test site again on Leopard.

For your information, it seems Apple includes apache 2.2.6 and php 5.2.4 by default on Leopard (as per a quick command line check), but I like having a custom setup for my needs instead of the default setup. The default setup suits most people and their own needs.
As well for the most basic emulation of cpanels setup you can create a home folder in your hard drive root. Then using terminal you can create a symlink using your cpanel user name and then the path to you user account's Sites folder.

[SleePy]

This is a test reply, Testing something.

[SleePy]

WEEEEE, another test.

[SleePy]

testing

[SleePy]

Testing WYSIWYG