This is the most geeky post we have ever put up on the blog, but having spent the last four hours knee deep in DNS, Apache and everywhere in-between I feel this information needs to be shared.
I will start off by explaining my requirements. I am thinking of buying a Mac Pro to use as my main machine and to replace the Linux server we currently have setup in the corner of the office. If the Mac Pro is going to replace the Linux box it needs to provide us with a web server (as well as file sharing, media sharing etc) and the web server needs to be accessible over the local network to all other machines in the office. Our Linux box is serving us well but I see an opportunity to merge two computers into one; making for a greener office and hopefully it will be a little easier to manage (I am far more comfortable in OSX than ClarkConnect). We call our Linux machine "tux", it has its own DNS server that means we can access it over the network at tux.lan. It works well but one of my issues with it has been having to install websites into sub-directories. For example our local toggle website sits at tux.lan/toggle.uk.com. Because our local sites do not live in a root web folder our local sites can have a number of differences compared to the live sites, these differences mean we have to be careful when deploying changes.
Continue reading Using MAMP as a local development server...
