Carp Diem

Things are busy here as always. I got to reinstall my Mini after a power hit and no UPS (doh!!!) but that was OK since I learned a few more things in the process of trying to bring the mini back to life including opening it. What a niffty package the mini is from a industrial design perspective. The engineers get kudos for the clean but tight packaging. Anways, the Mini is back up and running after a clean install of 10.4 and amazingly, things work better than when I first got it. I'm not surprised since it was someone's elses mini and all I did initally was to create a new account so I could play right away. I've been using the Postfix Enabler big brother called "Mailserve" now for about a month and it's great little app for the cheap price they want for it. What an awsome way to set up a real email server for cheap with the mini as the engine. It has been absolutely reliable and doesnt complain one bit about using POP and fetchmail to retrive email from the ISP unlike MS Exchange which complained bitterly every time it got the mail. The internal routing just works, no mess, no fuss. I'm going to start enhancing it but before I do, I may just install my new copy of Server 10.4.

Oh did I mention I have server now? oh yeah baby, a REAL OS and server tools to boot. I joined the Apple developers group and for a small amount, a real copy of OSX 10.4 and Server 10.4 plus a couple other resource DVDs headed my way. Plus a discount on a single piece of hardware, can we say Intel?

To get back into the saddle of programming in C, I got from Spiderworks their "Learn C on MacOSX" and their "Coco Game Programming Workshop" tutorial books. I also picked up a book on ObjectC so I'm trying to get back into it. My last programming in C was the days of "Turbo C" so you can see a refresher is in order. Visual tools? Bahh.. GUI interface? humbug! Yeah.. fun days .. not!

So anways, to get server up and running on the Mini I bought a 160 gig drive in the NewerTech miniStack V2. Sweet piece of hardware for the Mini. In preparation, I did a clone of the mini to my old Gen3 iPod an verified that I could boot from it if I have to. The new stack went in last night and works prefectly. So sometime in the next few days, I will be installing Server on it and using the stack as the boot device. It is claimed even using firewire, the faster drive makes a noticable difference on the Mini's performance since the internal 4200 RPM drive is such a dog. We shall see :)

Piloting the Mac

I just found a cool application called MacPilot which lets you tweak an amazing number of OSX settings on your Mac. All for ten bucks! This tool gives the non CLI user a way to really dial in the OS and perform tweaks that otherwise would require some arcane commands and a bit of luck on their part. Take a look at the screen shot and all the options available to you. Well worth the beer money they want.

DNS Me

For those of us have struggled with BIND in the recent past, the DNS Enabler from our new best buddies, Cutedgesystems, is very cool way to set up a buzzword compliant DNS server on OSX. I've spoken of Cutedgesystems before, with their Mail Enabler, and this new tool is just as nice. It takes less than 2 minutes to configure a DNS server on a Mac using OSX. So now I have a Postfix server and a DNS server running on my Mini. And it ROCKS!! small, quiet and stable, everything you want from infrastructure devices on your network. I'm running it in simple terms, plain old DNS but I plan to experiment some with it for dual MX records and other neato stuff that DNS can do.

You can see from the screenshot that the enabler is a single screen. It's very straightforward and easy to get rolling, you type in the domain name, forwarders if needed and the hosts. Click on "run dns" and call it a day. So can't Windows do this? Never mind, ..

Mini Recovery

Sounds like one of those spam ads doesn't it? Well, not exactly. I have been running my Mac mini as an email server using the Postfix enabler with decent success. But, the mini was bought used and it came with 10.4 loaded and I have been too lazy to whack it and reinstall a clean system. The fires over here did it for me, the power bounced a few times too many for the mini which was not on a UPS as it was in a "temporary" location. OSX would get to the blue screen and that was it. If I was lucky it would drop into a non-x windows session but refuse to accept my username or any username so a reinstall was forced on me. The good news was that I did not have very much at all on the mini. But in starting the reload at 11:30pm, I neglected to notice that the disk I grabbed was 10.3... oops~! So now, whack it or upgrade? How bad could it be with an upgrade? Loaded 10.4 as an upgrade and everything seemed to work except fetchmail. No way, no how was fetchmail going to fetch anything, much less my mail. #*(@@)@^#%#... whack the mini AGAIN and install 10.4 from scratch.. now the world is right and fetchmail works. Postfix enabler had my email server back up in five minutes from the time I mounted the DMG file.

While all this was going on, I needed a server for a few days so I went to my ex- Small Biz server which is now plain old Windows 2003 server after SBS self-destructed and installed a free server. hMailserver is a freebie Windows mail server with POP and IMAP plus it intergrates with ClamAV for windows. For free!!! how cool is that? You can get it at http://www.hmailserver.com/ and be excited when you find out it supports virutal domains, MySQL and many other "high end" features. See the list:

• POP3, SMTP, IMAP
• Virtual domains
• Built-in backup
• Scripting (VBScript)
• External accounts
• Rules
• Multilingual
• AntiVirus
• Spam protection
• Routing
• MX backup
• Load balancing
• Mirroring
• Multihoming
• SQL-support

Not too shabby for a freebie open source project. I still like my Mini but damn, this Windows app runs a close second.

I also learned that having a non-Apple keyboard when troubleshooting non-booting OSX sucks. I needed the apple key for a few commands and the PC keyboard is just SOL at the boot stage. Oh well...