Still, I did give it a go with some peer to peer solutions, even trying to get my own iChat server going (it was a complete failure by the way). In the past I had wanted to set up my own private chat server but since chat options have been ubiquitous and many throughout the years it seemed not only redundent but pointless if nobody else bothered to join in. So after a couple of years without any services altogether, I dusted off the Mac Mini 2007 and put it to work. Not even a fresh install would get it to function properly. Previously, I had been hosting email services ( POP, then IMAP, and SMTP) on the newer Mac Mini 2011 but something happened a few years ago that prevented SMTP from working properly in Mac OS X El Capitan. It can be bit of a pain to configure manually and with Apple server tools being notoriously finicky about custom configs, I've opted to run the service as configured out of the box. And to be honest, it's been a better experience this way.Īs mentioned earlier, email services are being hosted by a Mac Mini 2007 running Mac OS X Server Lion, which utilizes Postfix. As such I rarely use my personal addresses for anything outside of communicating with friends and family who I've specifically instructed to whitelist my address. If your email address isn't hosted by one of the big providers, even those servers that follow all the rules, messages can end up in junk email filters or even worse, rejected by those providers all together. I had been hosting my own email server since the late 90s (using the aforementioned WebSTAR Server Suite 4/5) but as the nature of the fight against spam intensified, and major providers started walling off their email gardens with ever more restrictive blacklists (I'm looking at you Gmail), hosting ones own email server has become problematic. Ever since I learned this valuable lesson, my DNS services have been remarkably stable. After a few years of thinking that things should be done my way, I resigned myself to simply welcoming my new Apple Server Overlords. Therefore, not only are all the zone and config files stored in non-standard locations, the server software itself has a tendency to overwrite zone files with data that it feels is more correct than anything any mere human administrator could configure. For anyone familiar with Apple products, Apple believes it knows best. Strangely enough, even though I've gotten pretty good at manually editing my zone files, Apple dose not like this. These days, Mac OS X Server runs the pretty standard Bind 9.9.7. While not as fancy as configuring zone data by hand in some esoteric terminal text editor like Vi, it got the job done with almost no complaints. It was configured via a very simple interface and ran it's DNS service as any other Mac OS application. When I first cut my teeth on hosting my own domains I used a piece of software called MacDNS. Both of these machines are happily sitting snug in my comfortable finished basement retro room. I also have an even more humble Mac Mini 2007 running Mac OS X Server Lion that acts as my email server. So go ahead and have a good chuckle if you are one of those nerds, I don't mind.Īll that said, here's my setup: The computer hosting the bulk of the services is a humble Mac Mini 2011 running Mac OS X Server El Capitan. I haven't felt any urge to make the switch. While it would no doubt be more practical to run the whole shebang in some Linux distro and a custom built rig, I've been maintaining Apple hardware and Mac OS X server software of various sorts for over 20 years now. Some folks might look down on me for using the gear I use to run my services but I think that makes it all the more fun. As the networked world grows ever more complex (and strangely more meaningless), I really enjoy having my own slab of cyberspace that can provide some fun bits of utility for myself and my friends. Sometimes it can be a real challenge configuring and maintaining it all but, most of the time, it just runs itself. I have been hosting network and internet services since the late 90s. Highlighted below are some of the technologies and services that i host on my personal server and network.
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