Switching…

I know it’s been awhile, but I’ve been a very busy boy lately with another project which at this stage takes a lot of work and attention. It’s still heavy in development and I’m making all the preparations for the first release. Me and my girlfriend are hard at work and the release schedule is still on track and the release is due in a few months. No it’s not software or computer related, it’s called project baby. But enough about that, you’re not reading this because of that, but I felt some explanation was due in the slow uptake of new things.

The good news is I don’t have to document and compile you a FTP-server as someone else has done the job for us and provided a great administration tool as an added bonus. It’s called Pure-FTPd and is a free (BSD), secure, production-quality and standard-conformant FTP server. It doesn’t provide useless bells and whistles, but focuses on efficiency and ease of use. Jean Matthieu Schaffhauser has written this nice Cocoa based front-end admin tool that lets you configure every aspect of this FTP server. A small list of features include:

• Virtual users, directories and hosts
• Support for SSL
• Limit up and download speeds per user
• Several ways to store user information like PAM or MySQL

The list is so long I would like to see the full list on the PureFTPd Manager homepage. From where you can download the install package as well. The install package also includes the compiled FTPd server but there are compilation instructions on the site available if you would like to compile our own. What a service…

I’ve had some problems today with emails being blocked from users using GMail accounts and after some researching and Googling I found out that Spamcop.het sometimes block email from Gmail. Even Google had a warning on the Gmail Help Center and an explanation why it was blocked. It’s because, according to Google, it doesn’t want to forward your ip-address in the header and wants to give you the idea of some privacy. I personally find this too aggressive to my liking.

I advised not so long ago that you could use blacklists to prevent spam. I also warned that you should determine yourself which ones you needed to use as some of them block faster than others. Now that I found this out about spamcop.net I’m removing it from my configuration.

To do this yourself you need to edit the file ‘/etc/postfix/main.cf’ and remove the line:

reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net,

This will remove the spamcop blacklist from your setup. You’ll need to trust the junk mail filtering in Thunderbird or Mail.app a bit more. I’m still working on the spamassassin setup but haven’t finished with it yet. I guess I’ll have to give that some higher priority after this.

update: Found an article on Techworld.com that gives some backgound info.

Besides writing this blog I read some of the blogs others write. Most of them are related to OS X and other aspects of my digital life. Recently I found this blog called Metaskills.net when researching external firewire drive housing I found his article using these drives. Got his RSS feed configured in Safari and I’ve been reading his writings ever since then. A few days ago he blogged about using the OS X shell or Terminal. As we all know we’d love to hate the Terminal for it’s simplistic (not very apple like) nature. He pointed me to an app called iTerm which is basically what the Terminal should have been. I’ve been using it for a few days and I must say I like it. I’m still using two or three windows open next to each other for the overview, but the tabbed sessions do help to avoid too much clutter.

I’m currently rewriting the documentation on installing MySQL, Apache and PHP losing the Server Logistics angle completely. You can have a small preview on the MySQL documentation here, it’s not yet completely finished. Let me know how you like it, it will eventually replace to original documentation.

Another nice e-mail I got from my ISP, they’ve just finished upgrading my connection. From today I have 3Mb downstream and 1Mb upstream. I hope you notice some of the increase in speed.

Donations and AdSense are still going strong for an Intel based mini… thanks !!!

It looks like the ‘majority’ would like the switch to the ‘official’ MySQL version from MySQL.com instead of the Server Logistics version. I will devote some time this weekend to see what the effort will be and if the installation process is as simple as the Server Logistics version and when not, how to simplify it.

The new Intel Mac mini is slowly materializing. As promised I will use all donations and AdSense income (and double it from my own pocket) starting from March 1st for buying a Mac mini. I received a very generous donation from David W. and the Adsense income was a bit more than usual. So I’m happy to report that we’ve collected 30 euro, which if I add my promise will add up to 60 euro. This would mean if the income stream keeps up I can order the new Core Duo Mac mini in about 6 months time.

Update: Just created a web page that keeps track of the funding for the new mini.

It looks like security is the big thing in 2006. I don’t mind because if everybody takes this seriously then we eventually will have less problems. It just takes a for us to read the release notices and upgrade our software and test to see if nothing important has broken.
Apple has released a new security update called: OS X Security Update 2006-002 it’s only 13 days after the previous one. Most of the updates have to do with the problems discovered lately. I mention the update because of the mentioning of apache_mod_php, but you don’t have to worry as our setup isn’t touched and you can update without any problem.

I’ve also had to upgraded my Blog to WordPress 2.0.2 as there where some XSS security issues in version 2.0.1 I just installed two weeks ago. You can read more about it on the WordPress blog. Upgrading was as easy as before and I think not many of you noticed anything.

I’m doubt what to do and need your input. I’ve been updating the Server Logistics packages in previous post to get around their slow update process. The PHP and Apache packages where not a real issue, there was a perfect source available without the binaries for running on Mac OS X. But for MySQL there is a perfect good binary package available with an installation program, procedure and support.

I’m willing to go to the effort to keep the MySQL setup as created by Server Logistics and try to compile from the source or shall we switch to the ‘official’ MySQL version which would mean I have to update all the installation and update instructions and documentation. It doesn’t really matter to me it’s work to be done either way.

A change will mean that everybody who wants to keep up has to change everything as well. I’m asking you for some feedback on which choice to make. Leave feedback on your preference…

Well I’ve got it working, it took some time because there was an older library in the PHP4 directory structure from Server Logistics that didn’t like PHP5 ! The XML library needed an upgrade to be included into PHP5 so I first had to solve that issue to get it all working. The only library I had to exclude was SNMP for the same reason as I had to leave it out from the PHP 4.4.2 compilation. The rest of the libraries that are used from the original PHP4 installation from Server Logistics so please install that before you try this upgrade.

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Server Logistics has a great package for installing the (L/M)AMP applications stack on Mac OS X, the only drawback is that they don’t upgrade their packages as I would like to see it happen. Especially when there are security issues with older version of PHP, MySQL or Apache. I’ve been able to get a more recent version of Apache compiled then they released and the last few days I’ve been struggling to get PHP compiled. I wanted to recompile PHP4 and PHP5 to be able to provide some choices. I’ve successfully compiled PHP4 and kept most of the Server Logistics structure intact. Most of the credits go to Bjarne D Mathiesen who wrote some documents and scripts in Danish I used to get this working. (more…)

Just a quick word. I wanted to let you know that the OS X Security Update 2006-001
won’t be any problem and you can apply it to your server setup (if you followed my instructions). Although there is an update in it where the apache_mod_php is replaced, we are using another PHP module which is located in a different place. The server logistics package is still at 4.3.9 and is still a security issue. I’m looking into compiling a version myself and help you compile it yourself without to much problems.

I’ve also upgraded my Blog to WordPress 2.0.1 last night, I was still using 1.5 and felt that I needed to upgrade. You might have noticed postings disappearing and appearing double in the RSS feed. Something went wrong during the upgrade but I made a backup !!! Which enabled me to try again successfully…
The Roundcube webmail project has made 2 patches available that solve two ugly bugs. One prevented from saving the language selection in the user preferences and the other completely omitted mail headers when having no smtp server configured.

What a surprise yesterday, Steve Jobs unveiled the new Intel based mini’s. As I have two mini’s, one first generation and a second generation one, I immediately dove into the technical specs of the machine and got even more excited. The graphics capabilities of the new machine are somewhat less in the 3D arena than the G4 mac mini but the rest has improved. It’s now a machine you could use for your Home Theatre needs with the well known remote, Front Row and the digital audio out. That’s all very nice but my interest lie more in the usage as a server. For this purpose most of the improvements make the mini even better than it already was. (more…)