We’ll I couldn’t let this pass by without posting a little tid-bit but today this site is up and running for 5 years. It has been running much longer then anticipated. While I still enjoy running the site I’m finding less time available to spend on maintaining the documentation. Mostly because other stuff is creeping up on my. Having a child growing up, currently 5 years, that requires attention and getting other non-computer related hobby’s do that to you. Since last year I’ve joined a Barbershop Choir with fills me with tremendous energy, I never knew singing could be this much fun.

I will try my utmost to keep everything up to date as much as possible as I know many of you use the information provided and there are still new people joining in. Currently I’m current with all the software but my WordPress installation is way behind and I desperately need to upgrade and I need to do something about the forums which have bee disabled because the spam was getting beyond managing manually.

Everybody: Thanks for all the support, that was and is the main thing I keep running this site.

We all know 37signals for their products like Basecamp, Highrise and others but also their advise on building web apps and running a company like ReWork.

They are very public on how they do things and they have published a blogpost on how they run their mail servers. It’s a very good read with lots of tips and links to services and solutions that if you run your own mail server are very useful. Things like having reverse DNS entries (a must), domain keys and more are explained. Follow their advice if you want your mail server to actually deliver most of it’s email.

This week the Mac mini turned 7 years. Steve introduced this at MacWorld in San Fransisco.

The quote he started with was “Why doesn’t Apple offer a stripped down Mac that is more affordable” and he said “I wish I had a nickel for every time somebody asked me that.”

The mini has evolved greatly since that day. I think it was intended as a cheap desktop replacement to help switchers but has now evolved to be used as a capable server for small and medium sized companies. There are even many companies that use it as there internet presence (I know as I helped a few of them setting it up). Read this blog post at the Macminiolo blog for the increase in performance in these 7 years.

The mini is used for many things, as embedded computer, media player, in-car entertainment system and many more. Just try some google queries. This one is awesome, only not for home use: a 48U rack enclosure to hold 140 mini’s.

The predecessor of this site switch.richard5.net was started a little later as my first Mac mini was bought a few months after the introduction with a 23″ Cinema Display. I started using it as my main machine at home after long exposure to Linux and Windows, it was my first Mac after admiring them from a distance.

I’ve since bought five mini’s and still have 3. A G4 for testing PowerPC Leopard installs, an intel one for testing Snow Leapard and Lion and the last one is located at Macminicolo.net and serving amongst others this site. My current main desktop is an 27″iMac and for sentimental reasons I recently even bought a PowerMac G5. I loved the case and this one was without a scratch, additional this was the first model that was sold using water-cooled CPU’s.

This weekend I’m moving all my sites and email to a newer mini again at macminicolo, as they rock (for real). My older production mini was a core duo Intel one which was still running Leopard (could not find the courage to upgrade with no backup machine available). Getting a newer machine (a 2 year old Core 2 Duo) also meant I could upgrade to Lion. I’ve installed the new machine from scratch and I’m currently moving site for site and email per domain to make sure that everything goes seamless for the end users.

If you are reading this you are looking at the new mini running Lion!

Why not buy the latest hardware you might ask, because it cost a lot more then a second hand and I really don’t need the power of it. All the sites and mail running on my mini are not giving it a real hard time. If I got slasdotted/fireballed I’ve got WordPress tuned with caching and could handle some load. The highest I got was 10.000 page views in a day, no sweat…

Another update after the redesign, as I needed to rewrite some of the instructions due to the effect of the changes in MySQL 5.5.x and the relocation of the installed software to /usr/local/ I’ve decided to restructure the content of the site a bit. Don’t worry all existing stuff will stay where it is with comments and all. So I’ve started rewriting the installation instructions for all the software on Snow Leopard first. It isn’t finished yet but you can have a look already, not much has changed but i’ve read it again, tweaked the text a bit and changed the compiling options of course to facilitate the relocation of the installed components. When everything is finished I will put notices on all pages to redirect everybody to the latest instructions.

You can have a preview of the MAMP setup and the mail server instructions.

When this all is finished I will start rewriting the Leopard instructions and will keep including the PowerPC instructions. To help me test the 64 bits instruction, which wasn’t possible on my old G4 mini, I’ve become the proud owner of a PowerMac G5 2,5 GHz dual processor unit. It’s a beauty in almost mint condition. I always wanted one of these aluminum “cheese graters” and got the opportunity to buy this one for a nice price. I really like this model as this is the first consumer computer that came with water-cooled processors. It’s nice to own a bit of computing history that looks this nice.