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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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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.

In our data center, we use Lithium to monitor and record the SNMP of all of our machines. This allows us to keep track of bandwidth, CPU usage, uptime, etc.

If you run any sort of servers, routers or switches, SNMP is probably important to you. So, as Leopard becomes more and more popular you’ll want to know how SNMP is used in the operating system. Luckily, John C. Welch has you covered with his article, “A Primer to SNMP on Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.5 Server.”

(via tuaw)

Hamachi is a VPN application that will allow you to set up VPN connections thru firewalls easily. HamachiX is the Mac OS X front-end for it.

I’ve used this connection on the road to be sure that my data was transferring securely. This will also allow you to connect to network drives or printers that may be on your home or office network.

HamachiX is free and can be downloaded from the HamachiX website.

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