DIYMacServer » News

How to tell if your Intel based Mac is 64 or 32 bits

Richard — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 19:47:31 +0000

Apple put up a page in the knowledge base explaining how to find out if your Mac is 32 or 64 bits enabled. It will explain how to find out which CPU you have and in that lies the answer.

The short answer is:

G4 mini now equipped with new HD

Richard — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:48:20 +0000

As you might have remembered my oldest mini had died a few weeks ago by a malfunctioning hard-disk. Getting a new disk took this long as my new MBP was enjoying all the attention it got from me. Installing everything a new and playing with a copy of Snow Leopard.

I got the mini a brand spanking new WD Scorpio Blue 320 Gb for 79 euro, it had the most bang for the money. I had to look for the putty knife because it has been a while since I opened up my Intel mini for a faster HD. Installing it was as simple as always and I was finished within 30 minutes. I’m now installing everything fresh, starting with Tiger to be able to test the new Dovecot instructions on Tiger for the people with the older G4 machines who can’t support Leopard yet. Please remember that after Snow Leopard Tiger support will be officially dropped. (which does not mean you won’t get any help but I won’t be testing everything in advanced and I will only assist in trouble shooting). when that is done I will install Leopard on a different partition (plenty of room on the new HD!) to be able to support all the people still using G4 and G5 based Macs.

If you consider that I bought this Mac mini in 2005 and it has been on constantly since a few weeks ago it means that the hard disk has lasted for almost 4 years of continuous use. Not bad for a cosnumer device!

By the way thanks for all the donations in the last few months as you can see your money is being put to good use.

Hawk Wings is back!

Richard — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:13:32 +0000

Yes, Hawk Wings the blog for everything related to Email, Todos and more is back. Tim Gaden has started to blog again after being more than a year off-line. His blog has been (and will be) a valuable source of information for people wanting to get the most out of their email (and related) programs on their Mac.

Switching from Courier to Dovecot

Richard — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:02:15 +0000

Well, I couldn’t leave Apple to it to be the only one making announcements on new products and features. There is some news here as well, I’m announcing a change as well.

OS X always had it’s own IMAP/POP3 server, called Cyrus, which I considered lacking and I used the Courier product stack which has always helped me a lot. But thanks to some attentive users (yes you James) I was informed that Apple is switching their mail server setup and they are moving to Dovecot.

It seems like Dovecot has become the better IMAP server, here is a comparison chart. From what I’ve read on the web Dovecot is more secure, faster and more IMAP compliant then any other server out there. Now the full details are available on Snow Leopard Server you will read that Dovecot is going to be the standard implementation. Here are some related news items that had spilled the news earlier: AppleInsider and Derek Underwood’s blog.

I’ve been playing with Dovecot for some time now, people following me on Twitter might have read about it already, and it is looking good. New mail notifications are faster than using Courier (almost feels like push mail). Dovecot also has most of the features we need and includes everything we currently used in separate modules from Courier (auth and maildrop). Because Dovecot can also do authentication there is no need for SASL anymore. This all will make the setup a lot simpler.

Also a feature called Sieve in Dovecot will enable server based filtering rules, this will enable server based filtering being managed by the end user.

My current plan is to first write an instruction for installing the basic mail server (postfix + dovecot) to provide the new setup to new users. Next step is writing a migration plan to be able to move current Courier users to Dovecot. Concurrently I will try to add current and new features that are enabled by the usage of Dovecot.

I hope you like the improvements and forgive me for not having a keynote

DIYMacServer is on Twitter

Richard — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:37:42 +0000

Well, as many others I joined Twitter. I did not want put everything here in the blog but still wanted to keep you informed on what I’m currently working on. So if you want to keep track of all the stuff I’m doing (strictly related to DIYMacServer of course) you can follow me at http://twitter.com/diymacserver.

I’ll be only tweeting what I’m doing at the moment or what I’m planning to do, if the task is finished and has some favorable results I will still blog about it here.

Be carefull with MySQL 5.1.x

Richard — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:44:13 +0000

Just got a link to this blogpost from Micheal Widenius a.k.a. Monty. Yes, the founder and orignal developer of MySQL who recently left Sun. He is telling the world that the 5.1 wasn’t ready for a GA release and that you should be carefull if you use it.

I’ve only installed it on my test server for the moment. I would suggest you do the same and not use it on a production environment untill the dust has settled on this. I will try to keep following this to keep you informed.

I will still write the installation document for 5.1 but it will be on your own risk if you want to use it. I hope this problem will be worked out soon.

MySQL 5.1 received GA status

Richard — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 15:18:02 +0000

Just to let you know that MySQL 5.1 has become GA and is now available for production use. It is a big upgrade and a lot has changed from 5.0. If you want to see everything that has changed please read “What’s new in MySQL 5.1“.

Please note that I’m currently testing 5.1 to see how the changes affect our setup, so please wait till I’m done before you upgrade. At first glance there are some major differences as my first compile attempt didn’t work. You now for instance have to indicate which storage engines you want to use during configuration to get them compiled, as this release boasts pluggable storage engines.

I will post again within a few days with all the details on how you can upgrade yourself.

MySQL 20% performance difference between 64 and 32 bits version

Richard — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 20:45:08 +0000

As I was working with Ceriel from Vakantieland.nl on compiling Apache, MySQL and PHP in 64 bit mode we both were interested in finding out if there is a big difference in performance. Getting the results took more time then first anticipated, Ceriel had a lot of problems getting the Perl DBD DBI components compiled as 64 bit modules which wasn’t as simple as expected.

But we finally got the MySQL Benchmarking suite running and we are happy to report that we found an avarage improvement of 20% when running MySQL in 64 bit mode. Which is a big improvement by just compiling the software for a different architecture.

We’ve ran the test by issueing the script ‘run-all-tests --fast‘. If you want the raw results please mail me or leave a comment.

Please note that this isn’t done as a scientific responsible test, it’s been done just off-hand to get an idea of the difference. We ran the tests on a Mac mini with a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU with 4 Gb of memory. Your results might differ with different machine types.

Mac mini not dead yet!

Richard — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 18:30:23 +0000

There where rumors floating on the internet that the Mac mini is dead. Sources indicated that european retailers weren’t getting any mini’s anymore. Which would mean that our beloved “server” platform is coming to an end. I guess the price of a second hand mini won’t come down soon if this really is true.

Appleinsider.com however came with a report this friday that gives a little spark of hope. Their report mentions a new mac mini that is on the way. As a source they have Brian Stucky of Macminicolo.net fame who mentions he knows what is coming. Read the article if you want to know more, I for one hope it is true as I really love the mini. Mine is getting a bit old and slow for desktop use and would jump at a newer and faster mini!

PS. On the appleinsider article there is a picture of the macminicolo.net datacenter. I wonder which of the 400 mini’s is mine?

New feature: Greylisting using SQLGrey

Richard — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 19:49:53 +0000

Just finished writing the documentation on adding greylisting as a new anti spam feature to our mailserver setup. Grey listing is a combination of whitelisting and blacklisting senders and mailservers. It does this all automatically, basically it asks all non whitelisted senders to try to resend the message after 5 minutes. Every proper MTA (mailserver) will do this without a problem. If the sender and mailserver have done this a number of times they will be whitelisted as a sender that does not send spam. (If you want all the details on greylisting read the site greylisting.org)

I’ve got it running for a few days now and my spam has almost dropped to zero. Normally my Junk folder would at least have 20 spam messages a day which are for 99% caught by DSpam and Mail.app. Meaning that this really helps, it will even improve the DSpam filtering capabilities as the spam/ham ratio is better now.

There is however a drawback to this setup. All email which is send to you from an irregular source will be delayed for a minimum of 5 minutes. If that is not a problem feel free to add this feature to your mailserver.

How to add greylisting using the SQLGrey daemon is now listed in the documentation set as well as a page on how to create startup scripts for this new feature.

Also note that if you use a backup MX this backup server should also have the same greylisting setup otherwise all mail from your backup server will bypass the greylisting as your backup server will be whitelisted. If you don’t have a backup MX server with these capabilities please contact me as I think I might be able to help you out.