About This Blog



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.

Used Mac minis



Our current inventory of used Mac minis.

Applications To Try




• Categories

  • Ajax
  • Apache
  • Automation
  • Backup
  • Blogging
  • Business
  • Chat Server
  • DNS
  • e-commerce
  • Ebook Series
  • Email
  • File Server
  • Firewall
  • FTP
  • iFolder
  • iPhone
  • Mac Developer
  • Mac OS X
  • Mac Server
  • Macminicolo News
  • Mail Server
  • Media
  • Monitoring
  • Music
  • MySQL
  • Network
  • Open Source
  • Organization
  • Permission
  • PHP
  • Port Forwarding
  • Reference
  • Remote Administration
  • Ruby On Rails
  • Security
  • Site Development
  • SNMP
  • Software Reviews
  • SSH
  • Subversion
  • Terminal Server
  • Tracking
  • Video
  • VNC
  • VPN
  • Wiki

• Recently Written

  • Macminicolo Black Friday Sale
  • Net Monitor Sidekick: Monitor Traffic For IP/Port
  • Mac mini Information
  • 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

• Archives

  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • October 2007

• Search

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.

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!

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.

When I travel with my Mac, I’m continually connecting to different wifi hot spots to check back on the data center and work with any support emails. As you can imagine, doing these two things, I’ve tried to be very careful not to use terribly private passwords and URL’s. You just never know if you can trust the network you’re using.

A couple months ago, I set up an SSH tunnel using these instructions. This allows for me to send all traffic encrypted to my Mac mini in the data center. This keeps things safe.

If you find yourself traveling often, perhaps this will be of use to you as well.

Noobproof provides a very simple front-end for ipfw. It takes just five steps to setup a rule.

The program is free and can be downloaded here.

I’ve had people write and ask how they can see what’s happening on their server. There are a lot of ways to do this, but fseventer is the best I know.

This application offers a GUI to watch all things that are changing on your Mac. It “observes filesystem changes using the same underlying API as Spotlight” so it is pretty thorough.

This is also a handy way to see what files are being changed when you run an installation or an update on your server.

The app is free…but quite forward about donations each time you quit the app. Get it here.

Most homes and offices have routers in front of their Mac servers so it’s important that the right ports be forwarded. The guys at at The Coding Monkeys labs intend to make this a bit easier. From the site:

Some times you want to access your computers at home from anywhere in the world. Be it the web server on your home server, the file sharing on your desktop machine or a remote login to your parent’s computer to support them doing their work.

This is where the application “Port Map” might come handy. Originally written as a proof of concept for our framework, it’s a fully featured all-purpose port mapper supporting all major routers, with presets and URL templates.

Get it here.

Following is a guest post from a Robert Schmid, a Macminicolo customer. If you have a tip on running a Mac server and would like to share it, please let us know.

I setup my first Unix server in 1997 on a Mac Quadra 840AV. It was great way to rehabilitate obsolete macs. My biggest problem then was spam. My war on spam continued for the next several years until I finally got it under control a few years ago. For me, mail filters are not a sufficient answer to spam. It needs to be stopped on request, not after your bandwidth has been wasted. I finally found two very important strategies for stopping spam - greylisting and wildcard addressing.
Read more

NetBarrier X5 is a very powerful way to protect your Mac while it’s connected to the internet. Some of the most interesting features are:

• Blocks hacker and vandal attacks
• Blocks ads from websites
• alerting you of any application that tries to create a network connection, or “phone home”
• filters all outgoing data to ensure that no sensitive information leaves your computer
• see your network traffic in real time

The interface is nice and straight-forward. The purchase page is a bit overwhelming, but as far as I can tell it is $50 for a one seat license. You can find out more on the developer’s website.

As you move from shared hosting to running your own server, you’ll have the ability to work with permission on your Mac. I suppose this is a two edged sword. You can unlock a lot of power for yourself, but you also have the ability to really cause some problems.

BatChmod makes it easy to change the permissions on different files and folders. It is a free application and is available from the developer’s site.

If you’re going to use your Mac as a server connected to the internet, you’ll want to be sure it’s secure. One of the best ways to do this is by using a firewall.

WaterRoof is an IPFW firewall frontend for Mac OS X with a easy interface and many options. Start from a fresh-clean system installation and be ready in 1 minute with routing/bridging, NAT and port redirection, bandwidth limits and everything you need to fine tune your ipfw configuration.

I thought the setup wizard was especially useful.

WaterRoof is free and can be download from the developer’s website.

Next Page →