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Far Away Mac is a weblog by Macminicolo.net about using your Mac as a server. We offer tips, application reviews and tutorials on setup. Let us know if we can be of any help.

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  • Macminicolo Black Friday Sale
  • Net Monitor Sidekick: Monitor Traffic For IP/Port
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  • Using a Mac mini For Data Retention
  • iVPN: Easy VPN Setup on a Mac
  • Seven iPhone Apps For IT
  • Using Your Server To Track Stolen Macs
  • PureFTPd Manager: Advanced FTP For The Mac
  • Load Balancing with Mac minis and DNS
  • Changes: Keeping Everything Up-To-Date

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We know we have quite a few folks who are planning to get a Mac mini hosted with us soon. For them (and any others) we’re having a Macminicolo Black Friday Sale. Anyone who signs up today will have their December charges waived. Just mention Black Friday in the comments section when you sign up.

(This can also apply to any machines added by current customers.)

We hope your holidays get off to a good start.

We try to help the common man set up a Mac server. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

We recently had a customer send in a Mac mini for their business data retention. I asked him to share a bit more with me to share with other customers.

In summary, he told me that because of the recent FRCP (Federal Rules of Civil Procedure) changes, he knew his company needed to be better about keeping full archived of all their email. It’s not enough to have nightly backups to disk or tape. He said, “What if I received an email from a customer and then delete the email. By the time the nightly backups run, that email will have come and gone. We needed something more thorough.”

He told me that in their mail server, they have the option to send all mail to a specific address. This would include all mail coming to their users, as well as mail that is sent from their servers. They decided to send a copy of all mail to macmini@businessdomain.com. Then, on the Mac mini they have in our data center, they have an account in Mail that is set up with POP retrieval of that email address. So everything is downloaded from the server and stored on the Mac mini in our data center. He also has that Mac mini cloned to an external drive here.

He said that there are a lot of other options out there for archiving mail, but he chose this option for three reasons.

First, the mail will be stored on their own hardware so they know it’s available and no one else has access to the email history.

Second, Using Mail.app gives you the benefit of spotlight searches. One of the new rules according to the FRCP is that the data should be searchable so quick and easy retrieval is possible for civil litigation.

Finally, he chose this way so hid email archives would be in a different physical location than his email server. He didn’t want his email server to also act as the archive to avoid loss from fire, theft, etc.

He also uses the Mac mini for archiving iChat transcripts in a similar way.

If you’re a business owner, it’s become quite critical to pay attention to data retention. Google has provided two great white papers on the FRCP changes and how best to align your company with the new guidelines. (I’ve made both available in a zip file here.)

Mac OS X has a great VPN server built into it. If you use the Server version, it provides a nice GUI to setting it up. Unfortunately, regular OS X doesn’t have that GUI. This is where iVPN comes is quite useful.

If you want to take advantage of the security that a VPN offers, iVPN makes it quite easy to setup a VPN. “All you have to do to set it up is to enter the user name and password that you want your VPN clients to use, the IP address range you want to give to your clients and then click start server. iVPN will handle all the other settings and start the VPN server.” Of course, this is especially useful if you have a Mac server that is always on and available at a static address.

iVPN is £14.99 and is available here.

If you’re reading this blog, you probably have a Mac server setup somewhere that requires your attention occasionally. For those of you with an iPhone, I hope to help you out.

Over on the Macminicolo.net site, I’ve put together a list of seven iPhone applications that I use every day to work with the Mac servers and IT work in general. You can read it here.

This last weekend, a good friend of mine called and told me that his office and been broken into early Sunday morning. The thieves stole 7 20″ iMacs and a cd player. (Luckily they didn’t steal the 24″ iMac or the Mac mini server with all the data on it. We keep that server hidden good.)

Thank goodness my friend had business insurance and we picked up 7 new iMacs and had them all setup and running by Monday afternoon. We look at it as an inconvenient, but inexpensive way to upgrade the iMacs.

So now the matter is whether the police will get the iMacs back. The chances are small.

However, this week Macosxhints.com published a nice post that would have been great to have had last week. It is titled, “An advanced script/web solution to track stolen Macs .” Basically it consists of a couple of scripts that stay hidden on your machine. If your Mac were to be stolen, and later connected to the internet, it could send it’s whereabouts and photos of the thief (assuming their is a built-in iSight camera.)

How does this pertain to a site about servers? Well, you can easily turn your Mac server into an FTP server that can accept the photos and information.

Anyhow, if you’re looking for a fun weekend project that you may be REALLY thankful for later, go take a look here.

The other day, a customer asked me to setup an FTP account for his clients to use in uploading files to his machine. And while the built-in file serving of Leopard is nice, it’s not made for this sort of thing. For instance, creating a “Sharing Only” user account will only allow AFP and SMB connections.

PureFTPd is a free FTP server and PureFTPd manager is a nice Mac GUI to getting it installed and setting it up.

When you start the application, there are just a few general questions that are asked to help the setup. You can then create users, assign them to certain folders or directories.

There are plenty of options and it makes it real easy to have a powerful file server. The app is free from the developer’s site, though donations are appreciated.

Every once and a while, I’ll get an email asking if we can take a load balancer in our cage. Load balancing is a technique to spread work between two or more computers. So naturally, a load balancer is hardware that makes this possible. The idea is to have multiple Mac minis to host a website so it continues to perform well for high traffic. Since our network and racks are tailored specific for Mac minis, we don’t install load balancers. But, we recommend a much better and less expensive way to do load balancing. We suggest DNS, or more specifically, round robin DNS.

Round robin DNS is a way for one domain to be spread between multiple machines. This way, each time the domain name is called, the request will be forwarded to a different machine. Below is an example of what it might look like courtesy of DNSMadeEasy.com)

So in this case, half of the requests would be sent to 192.168.1.2 and the other half would go to 10.2.54.4. Now each machine only handles 50% of the load. You can easily use up to 13 different ip addresses to really spread the load.

As you can imagine, there are some nice benefits to using Round Robin DNS:

• No extra hardware to purchase. (Load Balancers can cost thousands.)
• When used with DNS Failover, you could have one Mac mini go down and not have it apparent to the end users. It just gets dropped from thr Round Robin until it comes back online.
• Rather than using just one Xserve, you can use five or six Mac minis. Place them on different power strips, attached to different switches, and behind different routers. This way, should any of hardware fail (XServe, power, switch or router), there are still machines available.
• It’s easy to setup, and to add additional machines later. When your budget allows for another machine, just put it in the circle.

We have a few customers doing this now and it’s worked great. If it’s something that might help your company, we’d love to work with you. Just let us know.

Quite a few of our customers use their Mac minis as central storage for a team of people in different locations. We hear from a lot of business owners who have been trying to run the server from their office, but just need more speed, reliability and security. They recognize that we can provide all three, but often they are concerned about having the machine out of the office where they can’t keep a close eye on the different versions of data. They want to make sure everyone is up to date.

This is where Changes will come in handy. Changes will keep multiple machines in sync with the latest versions of documents and projects. If you prefer something more manual, it also provides a quick way to text comparison using popular text editors.

This is also a great way to backup and update your website.

Changes is available for $39.95 and can be downloaded from the official site. (demo available)

The whole reason I had a jailbroken iPhone was to run VNSea. This let me control all of the Macs in our data center.

But when iPhone version 2.0 came out, I updated despite losing the VNSea client.

So you can imagine how happy I was to see VNC Mocha lite. It is a very well done VNC client that let’s you store multiple connections to control both Macs and PCs. It has a real nice interface that let’s you scroll around the remote screen, use a mouse cursor, and pop up a QWERTY keyboard for use. Just set up your Mac server for Screen Sharing and off you go.

And it is also free. (They’ll be releasing a $5.99 version later that has a few more options.)

To learn more about the app, visit here. Or you can drop straight to the iTunes App Store to download it here. (iTunes Link)

Golden%Braebrun is the licensing backend for Delicious Library. It allows for customers to pay for Mac software seamlessly.

Wil Shipley, the creator of Delicious Library, is now making this framework available for other software developers. The back end is run on a Mac server and the front end is built right into your application.

Golden%Braeburn is in it’s last stages of testing, but you can sign up now to use the app when it’s ready. For a modest percentage of charges, you get stability, ease and security on your Mac software licensing.

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