It always happens when you are not expecting it or when you aren’t ready at all. It does in my case anyway. As you might know I’m documenting my own efforts in using my Mac mini as an internet server for hosting websites and taking care of the mailing needs of myself, family and friends. Before I got it a stage where you would end up with a decent setup and wanted to carefully ask around what people thought about it I got hit bigtime…
It started yesterday morning, Tim Gaden blogged about my efforts on his site which sort of started an avalanche of other blogs to follow like NonStopMac.com and not long thereafter even The Unoffical Apple Weblog blogged about me.
Today I find my site on the popular page of del.icio.us and I showed up on some of the categories on Digg.com .
I don’t know for how long this is going to be but I’m enjoying it and my server is not failing me. Another benefit is that now other people are reading my documentation and are leaving feedback. By mail or via the comment box beneath the page. This is proving very usefull as I don’t have all the answers and make mistakes as well. You are helping me in creating a better document.
For the rest I can give you some info on the things to come, after I’m finished with documenting the simple web and mail server setup in no particular order yet:
- SSL and TLS support for the mail server (encrypted communication between client and server)
- HTTPS support for the webserver
- SPAM filtering at the mailserver
- Web based mail
- Firewall (if you have a mac mini with Airport card, because you need 2 network cards)
- Make your server fault tolerant
- Managing the server (backup and restore, adding users and sites)
- Load balancing (preventing a /. effect)
- and more…
Let me know what you think is missing or would like to see, do you like the format of the documentation, is it readable (english isn’t my first language) and most important is it usable.
- No related posts
December 10th, 2005 at 6:12 pm
Congratulations Richard!
I’m another of your new readers and I like so much your work
In fact, I have 2 questions I would like to comment to you:
1.- Would be fantastic if I could read the complete article on my feed reader instead of a extract
2.- Would be cool too if, when you finish your documentation (thanks, thanks, thanks…), you put the same process with all the software available to do it more and more easy (would be perfect if you think on a friend than has no knowledge about terminal, configuration files, etc)
If you could, we love you if you could document some other scenarios like a small company and another use cases
Thanks again (and again) for you work
December 12th, 2005 at 11:11 am
Good work on the Mac Mini ISP project. It would be even better if we could add some additional network cards to this baby (via USB?) and turn it into a firewall too.
The Web hosting stuff looks interesting. I’m going to work through your docs this week.
Thanks!
December 12th, 2005 at 5:11 pm
Some feedback on the comments:
Garito:
1, No I don’t think so that is not why there is a feedreader.
2, Sorry again, I only document my own needs and what I do for myself. It is all for free and I do this in my spare time.
Dave:
There are two network cards in the Mini if you have chosen for the one with the Airport card. I’m going to do the firewall stuff as well, using fixed cable to connect to the broadband modem and the airport card to provide secure internet acces to my home.
Richard
December 13th, 2005 at 4:13 am
What about some documentation about setting up a domain name? I see you’ve mentioned DynDns, but didn’t really go into depth.
Also, another thing I’ve been interested in doing is setting up active directory, so that my pc’s and macs can login to my mini.
Otherwise, this is a fantastic resource! Thanks!
December 28th, 2005 at 9:42 pm
Hey, I love the tutorial! I have it running on my Macmini now. I was wondering however how to add multiple sites and multiple users.
Thanks!
Richard5: Just create a domain or an extra mailbox using the postfix admin tool. If you add a domain, make sure the DNS MX records point to your server. Give the address, username and password to your friend so that he can login and your ready for the mail part. For adding a website you need to setup a virtual domain in the httpd.conf, something I will document later on… But if you can’t wait try Google…