I’m very busy with a lot of updates which I need to test on all my test machines and production systems that I wish there were more than 24 hours in a day to get everything done. My current dayjob is also very interesting and challenging and requires a lot of input from my brain. But I’m still chugging everything as well a I possibly can so expect some more blogposts in the coming week.

Here is nice one for the people wh recently bought a mini, someone found out that it will take 8 Gb of usable memory just like the newer MBP’s. It’s a shame that it still soooo expensive but it is a good thing to look forward to. I’m almost temped to by another mini just to see how this would perform. I think it would make a awesome server, although I must confess that of my current production server only half of it’s 1Gb is in active use.

For people looking to host a server at MacMiniColo.net, they have some second hand mini’s listed on the sign up page which will do the job perfectly for less money. I did this myself as well and it is stil working. I like their service so much I recently renewed for a two year period.

Back to testing…

Update: Forgot to mention that I’ve finished installing everything on a clean install of Snow Leopard. So that now works as it is supposed to do. Next up getting my mini ready for the update and installing everything in 32 bits.

I know a lot of you are awaiting news on Snow Leopard! The early release has put me into a tight spot as I’m on holiday now (I’m typing this in an internet cafe paying a ridiculus rate per hour). Snow Leopard is lying in my mailbox at home and I didn’t bring any Mac with me. So bear with me untill the next weekend when I’ll be back home and will post updates.

Postfix has released a new version 2.6.5 as well. Usually they are installable without problems so feel free to update and I will test is soon!

Sorry about this!

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.

I’ve been considering a new Mac for quite some time now. I needed the upgrade as my current mini’s don’t support 64 bit mode. I’ve been dependent on the computers of others to develop the 64 bit instructions. This was not an ideal situation to work with. The trouble is of course choosing which Mac to buy. All new Macs are gorgeous and each has his strong points. The mini is the cheapest Mac which could do the 64 bits, I really like the mini (I have 3 of them). I even considered buying a Mac Pro with the possible virtualization options in the future. I finally settled for a 15″ MacBook Pro.

Some of the reasons for choosing a laptop were:

• The ability to take it with me. More people are depending on my support for their server (yes I offer paid support on a best effort basis) and being away from home without a Mac is making it difficult.
• The option to use it for my day job and to drop the ugly Dell laptop I got from my employer. You’ve got to admit the new unibodies are drop dead gorgeous.
• It’s gorgeous!
• I think the 2 GPU’s are going to give me an advantage when Snow Leopard will be able to utilize them with the OpenCL stuff. This should mean I can keep using the new laptop for quite some time without it getting old and slow.

I wanted to to thank all the people who donated money, it’s been used to help me buy the laptop.

Here is a picture of the new laptop on my desk at home. Still installing and configuring the basic stuff before installing a new version of DIYMacServer. Enjoy.

PS. Just found out my old G4 mini got a problem. Probably a faulty hard drive…

I wanted to wish you all a very Merry Christmas, hopefully with some nice Mac releted stuff under the tree. Also all the best for the coming year, hopefully the recession will not hit us that hard.

I’m looking forward to a new Mac mini or any new Mac on my desktop.

If you have any wishes for the new year related to the content on this site please let me know perhaps I can make them come true. So what to add or what subject to cover anything goes as long as it falls within the boundaries of my abilities.

After being annoyed for the nth time that my internal hard disk (still the standard 60 Gb) was full and hed to move some ofmy stuff to one of the 3 external hard disks connected to my desktop mini. I found a good deal and bought myself a Samsung 250 Gb, 7200rpm drive for 69 euro to replace the internal drive. I now can put my iTunes collection on the internal drive and as an added bonus the mini feels a bit more responsive. I haven’t actually measured it but compiling apache again looks like it is happening faster.

Why do I tell you this, because I paid for the drive partly with some of the money I got from the donations I received from some happy users. As this mini is used to test everything first I thought it was appropriate.

Next target for the donations is getting a new Mac (I hope for a new mini), I need it to be able to support you who want to compile everything in 64 bits mode. My current mini’s don’t support 64 bit. I’ve got one of the early Intel mini’s also paid for partly by donations in September 2006! (Boy does time pass quickly when you have fun)

Currently I can only support Tiger and Leopard on G4 and Intel 32 bits machines. Planning for the future I would like to support 64 bits Intel machines as well. As soon as Snow Leopard comes out the plan is to drop support for Tiger so from then on I will support Leopard on G4/G5 and Intel (32 and 64 bit) and Snow Leopard on Intel (32 and 64 bit).

I hope you agree with this decision as it is impossible to support every combination. I know some of you still use Tiger on older Macs and are unable to upgrade. Please know that I’ll try to help you to the best of my ability even if you are not using one of the supported combinations.

People often ask me why I have my own mail-server. Why spend all this time and money on having your own server when there are a lot of free email services that do everything you want and more for nothing. I don’t think I have to give you any examples you know the ones they mean. I tell them the following:

Because I can and because I like it!

I like to have my own mail-server because I like to be in control. I decide the features. I decide what happens with my email. I decide when email is spam. I decide the size of my inbox. I decide what is secure enough. I decide who gets access to my mail. Especially the last two are becoming more and more important when governments become more and more paranoid.

Another reason which, I guess, is only valid for geeks: It’s fun! You really get to understand the workings of email, spam filtering, and more. By configuring, tweaking and reading the log-files you really get to understand what happens and how you can improve your own mail-server.

Why did you choose to have your own mail-server ?

Since having a Mac mini at Macminicolo.net I currently have the luxury position of having two Mac mini’s connected to the internet. This gives me the ability to try new configurations for the DIYMacServer setup.

The first thing I tried, now I’ve got everything migrated, was getting my home server to work as a backup MX server. I found out that it was pretty straightforward and adding one line to the main configuration made it work.

I’ve added it to the documentation set, so if you have the same luxury as I have and have more than one server connected you could use the this as well. Read how to do it here: Configuring a backup (relay) MX server.

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.

Currently supporting 2 OS X versions is a pain even without the PowerPC and Intel differences. Everytime I need to reboot my desktop from a different disk to test the setup and any changes. Luckily because of my virtual setup on the server I can access most of my stuff like email and blogs from everywhere without to much hassle but my iTunes library won’t. But I’m working on other stuff as well besides this project (one of them being a redesign of this site) and I can only do that from one of the OS’s as the test machine is also my desktop machine. I currently have two Mac mini’s, one G4 that is my production server and I use it to try out the PowerPC stuff and an Intel mini that is my primary desktop and test machine.

There are few possible solutions to ease my pain and give me greater flexibility and faster response time to changes and issues:

• Get another primary Desktop!
  • Another mini would do it for me but it what would be the gain besides having another one. No performance increase, just another box.
  • An iMac would be nice but I already got a perfectly good display (23″ Cinema Display) wich would be a waste of money.
  • I would love to get a 8 core Mac Pro (basic setup) but it’s still expensive. Perhaps a second hand is a viable option.

  By the way, I don’t want a laptop. I don’t want to work everywhere. I’ve tried it and it is not my thing to work on the couch while watching a movie.

• Virtualization!

  This would be the perfect solution but currently unobtainable due to licensing issues. Even if I will be running everything on a Mac it still isn’t allowed to run OS X workstation in a VM solution. Server is allowed in the near future but that would defy the purpose of using a workstation version instead of a server to do a server task. There are hacks that enable to run OS X in a VM solution but they all run on a host using Linux or Windows. I haven’t seen any hack that runs a guest OS X in a VM on a OS X host OS.

  If this would be possible (even unoffically) I would really love it as it would make my work a lot easier. I can imagine buying a 8 core Mac Pro and run a complete virtual server park on the single Mac and be able to test everything. I could even try out load balancing and fail overs.

  It would be great to be able to make a snapshot (instead of a disk image, which is slow and takes up a lot of disk space) and try something like an update and reverse it in case of problems or errors.

These are some the things I’ve been thinking to improve my situation but maybe I’m overlooking something obvious. I would love to hear about your ideas or suggestions as I haven’t decided on any of them yet.