So we went to the Apple Store last night to get Mike his 3G iPhone, and I finally picked up a copy of OSX server.

Turns out that setting it up as a domain controller was literally trivial - there's a combo box where you choose "Standalone Server" or "Primary domain controller". So now we have a domain, giving us one centrailized authentication system for the whole home network.

We'll move the machines into the domain as we remember to, but the two Macs and one PC are there now. OSX server also let me fix the wonkiness with the Time Machine drives, and now both laptops can back up at the same time (before I had server, only the person logged into the server could backup).

On top of that, I finally found a recipe program I liked, called Connoisseur, and I did a bit of scripting to get them to auto-sync. We'll see how well it works in the long term - I may just not bother keeping the database on the laptop anymore and just leave it on the machine in the kitchen.

This Mac stuff is pretty cool. :)