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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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  • 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
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I have yet to find a really good application to monitor all traffic coming to/leaving from a Mac, but this one is close.

With Net Monitor Sidekick you just start the application, choose your network interface, and watch the traffic flow. The program offers a few preferences, but pretty much does as expected out of the box.

Right now, the program is in beta and can be downloaded free. Though there is a warning that the beta will expire on Mar 31, 2009.

You can down the application here.

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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.

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.

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 other day, I had a server that would turn on and immediately start pushing 80+Mb/s. Needless to say, something was wrong.

I didn’t want to compromise the network, so I turned to ipfw to create a bandwidth limited pipe to apply to the port. This hint on MacOSXhints.com explains it nicely.

Advanced OS X users know that Darwin comes with ipfw, which can be used to set up a custom firewall. This same service however can be used to also limit bandwidth on specific ports.

Example:
sudo ipfw pipe 1 config bw 15KByte/s
creates a pipe that only allows up to 15KB/s to go through.

Then:
sudo ipfw add 1 pipe 1 src-port 80
will attach that pipe to the outgoing traffic on port 80, effectively limiting the outgoing traffic of the web server.
sudo ipfw delete 1
will remove the pipe from the port.

Of course, you can also find a GUI interface to this in WaterRoof.

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.

This one isn’t directly connected to running a server, but it’s incredibly useful for those that are on the move quite often. (And those who are on the move quite often usually have servers, so there’s my justification.)

Most of my internet time is spent at my house, my office, or the data center. In all three places I have static ip’s for port forwarding, etc. For each spot, I have a “Location” setup on my MacBook Air. I got tired of manually changing the location each time I moved around so I went searching and I found Locamatic.

Locamatic is a preference pane that will automatically change your Location based on whatever network your Airport card joins.

I’ve had it setup for a week now and it’s worked flawlessly switching me between locations.

If this sounds useful, you can it here for free.

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