News


30
Jan
2007

It’s time again for a rewrite/overhaul of the documentation to include all the remarks I’ve gotten over the past time which weren’t really serious errors or omissions but would make the documentation a bit better to use. If you have any remarks on improving the documentation, please leave a comment

This rewrite also coincides with another decision I made. After all the comments I received over the time I had this site up about the name “ISP in a box” I’ve been trying to think of a new one. Some of you helped me at my last plea to provide some input the creative process. After some sleepless nights I cut the Gordian Knot and made a decision. I looked if the domain name was still available and registered it.

DIYMacServer.com

The page you currently see is a place-holder, but in the backgound I’m busy hacking together a new WordPress based site, with new forum software which has some advantages over the current forum. I’ve finished a simple consistent design (not very web 2.0 or very pretty, but I’m not a designer) and as soon as I got some content to show I’ll open up the site and migrate the current forum entries over to the new one.

I’ll guess I need to organize a design competion for the look and feel and perhaps get a nice logo to go with it. All I can offer is a small price and everlasting fame, maybe someone is up for sponsoring ? As this is strictly a hobby project funded by your generous donations I don’t want to spend much of that on a design. If you want to help out or have some ideas on how to tackle this please let me know.

12
Jan
2007

My network provider had some major problems today, I was out for most of the morning. It looks like some hardware at one of the central network failed and all customers where affected. The helpdesk phone had a taped message that they where replacing hardware from their vendor. I guess one of the central routers failed ?

I guess the new owner of the network isn’t keeping up with maintenance. I hope it wasn’t too much of a problem to you…

23
Dec
2006

I wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas, and a happy 2007.

I’ll try to make 2007 as good as 2006 was with new features and help you in running a stable mail and web-server for your customers, friends or family.

To get into the Christmas spirit it really helps to have some snow but here in the Netherlands that isn’t going to happen this year. So I’ve downloaded this little gem to give me some snow even it it is artificial. If you don’t have snow this year yourself you might like this program running on your Mac as well ;-)

21
Dec
2006

I, like most people, am sloppy in my backup procedures. Every now and then I created a tar archive of the important stuff and burned it to a DVD for safekeeping. But the time in between those backups was usually more than six months. I was looking for a cheap solution that would solve all my problems. Buying extra external harddisks came to mind but as it is now they would mostly be used to store more movies.

Untill I found out earlier this week about the solution Alex King (of wordpress fame) came up with for his backups. The Amazon Simple Storage Service or Amazon S3 for short. It’s like a very cheap online disk using the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. So it looks like it will be there for some time. It’s cheap as well, $0.15 per GB/Month and $0.20 per GB of traffic. Someone else has done the math for us and it looks like it is cheaper than buying external disks. At least it will be more reliable. The only downside is the speed at which I can up or download information.

The only thing I didn’t like about Alex’s setup was the use of JungleDisk. While doing some googling I found other solutions that could help me in my accomplish a simple off-site backup solution. I really liked the s3sync.rb solution as it resembles the rsync command which I know how to use. The only problem was that it used the language Ruby which was a big unknown to me. I’ve heard and read about Ruby on rails for some time now but never had the urge to try it out. But I was willing to give it a go.

I’ve got it all working and documented now so you can use this service as well. Currently I’m backing up like never before. The first time I ran the backup it took forever, but then after that first time only the new or altered files would be uploaded saving a lot of time and bandwidth. I’m currently backing up all my websites and the virtual maildirs on my server on a daily basis. This is about 200 MB of information which will cost my about $0.02 a Month to store plus say $0.15 for data transfer fees. Which means that I will have a full secure online backup which I can access from anywhere all the time for say $0.25 a Month !

Next up I’m going to write some scripts to upload my iPhoto stuff as well.

2
Aug
2006

I know I’m a bit late with this but for everyone who used my info to configure their mailserver needs to know this even if it is late. I don’t have a record who is using my setup and therefore I have no others means than posting this and hoping you will read this. I found out the hard way by trying to email someone who uses my setup and to find out my mails are rejected. I got emails returned with the error message:
host mail.domain.tld[xx.xx.xx.xx] said: 554 Service
unavailable; Client host [yy.yy.yy.yy] blocked using opm.blitzed.org (in
reply to RCPT TO command)
(more…)

8
Jul
2006

Just a quick post to let you know that I’ve become a father yesterday of a healthy little girl called Anna Charlotte. I’ll be off-line for the next week or so…

Thanks for your patience !

26
Jun
2006

Well, it is all taking more time than anticipated, although we are on the verge of a breakthrough in getting the lost MySQL shared libraries issue solved.

In the mean time I’ve finished installing and creating a consistent look and feel for a phpBB based forum. You can use it or just look at it on http://forum.richard5.net. I hope you find it useful, specially as with the baby coming I will have less time to answer all your questions. This way we can all pitch in…

As I said earlier, I hope to solve the issue with MySQL this week, it has taken me a lot more time than anticipated. I had planned to have the V2 installation and configuration ready last month. The plan was to have a first release of a decent spam-filter configuration ready by now. But don’t despair, it is still coming, just a bit later than planned. Sorry.

30
Apr
2006

Besides spending a lot of time on preparation for the baby (decorating a new room and doing a lot of shopping) I found some spare time to assist people in getting their setup running and started rewriting the configuration of the mailserver. I’ve finished 3 pages but haven’t found the time to thoroughly check them. I’ve just been rewriting from the original pages and creating the scripts that go along with them. I hope you like it, it is meant to be somewhat easier for the novice user.

Last post I told that donations where a bit slow and the next day one big donation came in which brought us right back on schedule for ordering the Mac mini core duo in July which would be great as the baby is expected to arrive late July.

I’m thinking on setting up a forum so you can help each other in answering questions as I will be spending more time with diapers and bottles in my hands than a keyboard when the baby arrives.

23
Apr
2006

Besides some of the time I have to spend on other things this weekend I found some time to improve and continue on the documentation for the ISP in a box v2.

I’ve checked the installation procedure again after some reports of errors of using the installation with phpMyAdmin. I seemed there was an important option missing from the configuration command.

Next stop was building the mail server, I ‘ve got the build process documented and checked properly. Next up is documenting the configuration of the mailserver.

You can have a look at the new pages for building the server, hope you like the new look. I’ve made some changes to the style sheet to make the commands and the configuration stick out a bit more and make them more readable.

I hope there are no issues with relocation of the MySQL, Apache, and PHP documentation, they where still located in the hierarchy of version 1 and I had to put them in the correct place. Sorry….

Donations where a bit slow these last 2 weeks, didn’t receive any, and the Adsense income these weeks has also been slow. A well, it’s not that important, I will need to be a bit patient. That will give me more time to document everything proper before launching myself at a new toy ;-)

16
Apr
2006

Sorry for the outage of the site this morning. Somehow my ADSL modem had to be reset and I wasn’t at home at the time I noticed it. When I found out I had someone else come by and do a hard reset. But it took quite some time before I noticed it and it could be resolved. That’s one of the issues when you host your sites at home. Although I don’t think that someone would be available today if I had my machine at a co-location site. If someone knows of a way to remotely reset a device or turn the power off and on I would love to know about it. It can’t be through the internet because that would be unavailable. I guess I’d have to think about a dialup connection or something that can be remotely controlled via a GSM.

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