I’m working on an app for tracking meals at work, so I’m setting up a couple Mac minis as servers.

The first time I worked on this app, I used MAMP to help with development. It was very handy and made a complex task much easier for me.

But, I always felt like I was taking the easy way out. That by skipping the server setup, I was missing some knowledge that would be useful, elsewhere.

So, now that we’re slowly returning to work, I have been charged with getting the Meal Tracker back up and running.

This time, I have a couple Mac minis (one at home and one at work). I’ll be setting them up with MySQL and PHP and Apache. And, I’ll be setting them up “properly.”

I found these pages useful:

Install Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin on Mac OS X

Updating Apache, PHP, and MySQL for macOS Catalina

I was thinking that something that has changed, since the last time I worked on this, is that I’m much more comfortable working in the Terminal and working on servers, in general. This time, I am using Homebrew to help manage installations.

But, now, I’m wondering about whether I should be using Docker…

For a couple of weeks, about the same time every day, I would get a call from the lab coordinator that the computers were having problems connecting to the Internet.

The network pref pane said that the Ethernet connection was Connected.

Symptoms: A user would try to get to a website, like ixl.com or pbskids.org and the progress bar would stall about mid-way, and the browser window was blank.

I could remote in via ARD and look at the Network settings. All were correct. They all had a unique IP address, within the range of 192.168.0.2-192.168.1.253.

Using Terminal, I could ping outside servers.

I could launch VMWare Fusion, and using a browser, running on Windows, I could reach those same sites.

I tried resetting Safari, clearing the caches in Firefox, reinstalling the browsers.

Then I found this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4093878?start=0&tstart=0

Solution: Turn off IP6 (!)

Open the Network Pref Pane, unlock using the pref pane

Click on "Advanced..."

Change the value for "Configure IPv6" from "Automatic" to "Off"

Click "OK"

Restart the iMac.

It works!

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