If you are reading this the page has been fed from the new server at macminicolo.net. I hope you like the new speed. Now this is finished and most of the design has been tweaked I now can spend some time on writing some more documentation again. I hope to get the Leopard specifics for the installation grouped into one place, the aim is to get this done before the end of May.
You all might have noticed the new sponsor banner on the new site for macminicolo.net on the right hand site and wondered why. The thing is I’ve decided to move my server from home to macminicolo.net to keep providing this website and service to the best of my abilities.
It’s not something I decided on a easily, I was always proud to be able to host all the sites with their respective email server from my home using my simple DSL connection. But lately the stability of my DSL connection has gone down. I’ve had two outages this year alone.
I used to have my DSL connection with a small reputable ISP which delivered great service. Whenever you needed assistance you could call the help-desk and someone who actually understood what you where talking about was able to help you and get you going again. But consolidation is the name of the game and large ISP’s are buying the smaller ones and the service deteriorates rapidly. Whenever I call now they tell be to reboot the computer as they assume I’ve got a Windows machine and all the questions are scripted as with any call-center.
I still believe that it is possible to host from home using your DSL line, the outages I had never lasted longer than half a day. Which meant that I would never loose any mail. But too many people are currently depending on my server to be up and running 24/7. If you don’t have that requirement and can live with 99% uptime instead of 99.999% you’ll be fine hosting at home.
Brian Stucky offered me a great deal at macminicolo.net which made the decision to go outdoor a lot easier. In exchange I’m putting a banner on the site to return the favor. I think he is running a great service for us Mac lovers who want to use a mini as their server platform. He’s very quick to respond to any question I had, even the outlandish ones. Besides the standard packages macminicolo offers there is room to customise the offer to your needs. I will keep posting on my experiences with macminicolo but untill now they are excellent… TUAW recently tested macminicolo and they liked it as well.
An additional benefit might be that the site might become a bit more responsive as the bandwidth will be a lot better.
PS. If fiber to my home becomes affordable (which will take a few years) I will reconsider my options again!
Here is another episode in the problems with the mod_ssl module in Apache on Leopard. But it is a positive one. Because of the latest security update 2008-2 the default Apache install on OS X Leopard is now 2.2.8. This means we can upgrade our version as well and copy the mod_ssl module from the original installation as done previously.
I’ve looked for more workarounds, but they are all a bit drastic or don’t work. The one I haven’t tried yet is upgrading libtool as I’m not sure that would help and not break any other stuff.
You only need to do this if you need mod_ssl, if you can live without it just follow the normal installation instructions.
I know, I should have know better and I should have upgraded my blog as I was supposed to do as advised by Matt. But I was busy working on this new design which I was doing on a new install of Wordpress 2.5 with a copy of the database as my site got hacked yesterday. The whole database was corrupted, pages and comments disappeared. While I was trying to restore a backup as soon as possible I made things even worse than they already where.
To keep it short, I just made my test environment where I was developing the new design of the site the current live site. It was the easiest thing to do and I only lost some posts and comments by that. Which I still will try to retrieve in some manner when possible. The design isn’t finished, it still needs some tweaks. I just received an email from the designer with a large list of items I need to change. Tanja, I’m sorry I will do them as quickly as possible.
Hope you like the new design even if it isn’t completely finished yet.
I don’t usually do this but I think I can get away with this as I consider it relevant to a lot of people reading this site. Even if they are hosting from home like I do. There is a contest going on at MacMiniColo (the hosting company that specialises in hosting mac mini’s). They will give away a year free hosting, including the mini and a Macbook Air for the best idea that you have in using a Mac server. Check the site for details.
If you are entering let me know. I’m not entering as I guess my use is a bit too obvious! Good luck with your entry!!!
Allright, the update for Courier-Auth that solves the bug found when using with Mac OSX is released. There where some other issues that were fixed in the IMAP server and some other small bugs in other parts of the courier software stack that we don’t use in our setup. The bug fixes that concern us are:
I’ve tested these new releases (0.60.2 for Courier-Auth and 4.2.1 for Courier-IMAP) and they work, don’t forget to do a:
after you’ve done a ‘make install’ on the courier-auth daemon.
As you might have noticed from the comments on the blogpost on the new version of Courier-auth, there was something wrong.
It turned out to be a completely different error than first reported. Everything looked allright after compiling and installing but it all went wrong when trying to start it up:
/usr/local/var/spool/authdaemon/pid.lock: Bad file descriptor
ll_daemon_start: Resource temporarily unavailable
I checked permissions, deleted the files, to no avail. At a loss I posted a question to the courier-user mailinglist and I got a reply and a patch within a few hours. I’ve just tested the patch and it all works as expected.
Now we only need to wait for the official release of the patch into the next release.
During my absence (having a summer holiday in Italy is something I can suggest as a well spend two weeks) there where again many updates. I’ll briefly name there here and will let you know later on if there where any problems with it.
PHP got upgraded to version 5.2.4 which covers several bug fixes and some inor security bugs. A detailed changelog can be found here.
Apache was updated to version 2.2.6, this version is principally a bug and security fix release. Read the changelog for more info.
Lighttpd was updated to version 1.4.18 which contains a fix for a buffer-overrun in the fastcgi protocol.
Yes, I’m away for a while to a place that I don’t think has permanent accessible internet access. This means I won’t be responding to all your comments and questions for two weeks, but don’t dispair. If you’ve got issues and are willing to share them with the other I suggest using the forum where others are willing to repond to your needs. See you again in 2 weeks !
Well it was time to add another component to the DIYMacserver suite. I’ve chosen for the version control system called Subversion. I hope you approve of the choice. The choice was first made because I started to use it at work and a second reason was that I could not find a single instruction on how to compile and configure it on Mac OS X. Most installation instructions where based on using Fink or using a binary package. Please read the first attempt at documenting here.
If you know of another component worthy of adding to the DIYMacserver suite, please let me know.
RSS feed