Switching…

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.

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…)

I was stuck with a problem I encountered a few weeks ago when I got back from my holiday. I was trying to post my holiday snapshots on my webserver to show to my friends, when I noticed that the big pictures didn’t want to load completely in the browser. They only downloaded for about 1/3 in the browser and I had to refresh the page several times to get the full photo. I’ve been banging my head on this for some time until David W. pointed me to a bug in Apache 2.0.54 that caused the error. He also explained how I could upgrade to 2.0.55 and keep all the things I had configured with the package from Server Logistics in place. If you have the Apache package running from them you might as well follow these instructions as well. (more…)

It has been a very busy week and not just for me. Wietse Venema (author of Postfix) released a version 2.2.9 of the Postfix mail-server and I also got an email from Sam Varshavchik on the Courier-announce mailing list that there is an updated version of the Courier IMAP server. Which meant that I had to download, compile, install and test all these new versions again on my test server before I could update my own server and tell you it was safe to upgrade. (more…)

Completely missed it, but I got a comment from Geva who mentioned an error during compilation. When I checked the error I found out that there has been an upgrade, the latest version is 0.58 instead of the 0.57 I used when I started this setup.

The related documentation has been updated and if you want to upgrade you can just download the new source-code and run the build commands as documented. Don’t forget the command: (more…)

I’ve started the new year with migrating everything from my old Sun Ultra 5′s who have been running my internet services for the past few years to the Mac mini. The pages you are looking at now are served from a Mac mini as it was my intention for some time. The mini is setup using my own documentation with no deviation whatsoever. (more…)

It’s almost Christmas and I’m off to celebrate with the family and to take a few days of to visit and enjoy London during the days between Christmas and New Years eve. So don’t expect much posting between now and the first of January.

I would like to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I hope you’ll find a Mac mini under the tree if you haven’t got one yet and find some fun use for it. (more…)

This is the final page I needed to write down to configure the mail-server and get a secure enough setup to my liking. The final page is like the last page I added an optional extra to get secure access to the mail folders located on the server. It’s a description of how to configure IMAP to use SSL and/or TLS so that an encrypted communication channel will be setup before any passwords or e-mails are send over the internet. Which will make (more…)