I’ve finally obtained my 1Ghz G4 eMac, and with it, Tiger. It’s low on memory as the memory sent to take it to 1GB does not work with my eMac. Oh well. I can try to limp by at 256M until MemoryX replaces it, right?

One of the first things that I’ve noticed is the lack of Startup Items and /etc/hostconfig presets for BIND that are still there in MacOS X 10.3.x.

A short list of no-longer-there-as-startup-items-but-still-installed programs which are no longer controlled via /etc/hostconfig:

DNSSERVER (Bind) MAILSERVER (Postfix) RPCSERVER (NFS)

The support software is still there, but the Startup Scripts are not. They’ve been moved to the new ‘LaunchDaemons’ system, which is basically a hybrid idea of djb’s daemontools, xinetd, and far too many drugs. I know everyone’s jumped onto the XML train, but COME ON, PEOPLE.. EVEN CRON? Ahem, anyow..

Being that I run a nameserver on my iMac (which will now be secondary to my eMac), I find this a bit disappointing. For the last few years, I’ve usually used djbdns on my other UNIX hosts, but in an effort to be more compliant (and to play with encryption for subdomain transfers, etc), I’ve opted to drop back to BIND.

[Update:]

I had ended up re-setting the DNSSERVER variable in my /etc/hostconfig, and copying across the startup script structure from /System/Library/StartupItems/BIND/ – This wasn’‘t the ‘Tiger’ way to do things, but it worked. However, I generally want to do things ‘right’, so… After doing a bit of further research, I discovered that these services are now managed by YET ANOTHER Apple tool, specifically ‘LaunchDaemons’.

Since someone’s already written the article on how to do it properly, I’ll link to Dan’s “Bind on Tiger” article rather than making my own.