Mac360's Mac User Forums - Kate MacKenzie and Ron McElfresh

New Tweaks to Mac360

2006-09-14T17:38:56-06:00

I’ve been working with Ron and Bambi on a number of tweaks to Mac360; throwing out old code, inserting new code, and adding new graphics and links to navigation.

We’ve added a few tweaks to the Forums, too.

There’s post anchors, permalinks to each post, new features in the user control panel section, new member search on the member list, and more. Navigation should be easier, too.

The whole site still runs off a Mac, and we hope to have additional goodies over time. Some of the code remains from the beta site back in early 2004.

We have fairly recent (Bambi?) photos of everyone at Mac360 except for Jack and Ron. Men!! I have to admit Ron’s is the best of the group.

We have one major feature we’d like to employ-- more frequent daily updates. Our current process is legacy from the early days when Bambi and Tera would write something, send it to Ron who would produce the graphics to match, then publish the article. That’s a laborious process for Ron as each graphic can take 15-minutes to half an hour or more to produce.

So, we’re looking for a better way to add articles, reviews, and commentary without graphics, yet integrate the pieces into the Forums. Any ideas?

There’s more to come. Thanks for helping us out on the forums.

Mac web sites running on Macs?

2008-04-20T17:49:55-06:00

Does anyone know of any other Mac-oriented web sites that are running on a Mac? Mac360 is hosted on an Xserve which runs OS X Tiger Server, not Leopard. Most Mac-oriented web sites that I know of are running on Linux machines.

Mac360, OS X, Server Logistics

2007-03-10T14:36:09-06:00

Mac360 completed a move from our PowerMac G5 server running Mac OS X here in Honolulu (under my desk), to an Apple Xserve located at ServerLogistics in Los Angeles. Our initial tests and subsequent experience shows that the Xserve renders and serves Mac360’s web pages about 4x to 6x faster than the PowerMac G5. In fact, the move was so straightforward and painless that we completed the transfer a full four days earlier than anticipated.

ServerLogistics (SL) is a Mac server host, featuring PowerMac G5s, Xserves, and co-location facitlities. While we wanted a host that would provide dependable service and sufficient bandwidth and horsepower for future growth of Mac360’s needs, there was just something extra about hosting on a Mac. After all, Mac360 is about Macs. SL provides a few items in their service that are more difficult for us to maintain, such as redundancy, database backup, multiple email servers, and so on.

For anyone who wants to run a Mac as a server or web site, there are a number of issues to consider. Redundancy is one. “Up Time” is another. We managed to keep Mac360 up about 99.5% of the time, which isn’t too bad, considering the site was running on a stock PowerMac G5 sitting under a desk. That means the site was down for about 10-minutes once a week.

Here’s how “Up Time” works. Turn on your Mac, leave it running for a month, and it’s “up” 100% of the time. 99% up time means about 7 hours a month of down time. 99.9% up time means about 45-minutes a month of downtime. 99.99% up time means less than 5 minutes of down time per month. Apple releases some kind of Security Update and OS X Update, on average, about once per month, which usually requires a reboot. Database backups are more easily handled when traffic is low, so we usually stopped the site for about 10-minutes each week during the backups, then did updates, and a reboot, hence the 99.5% up time average.

Redundancy is an issue, too. Even with multiple hard drives, what do you do when the Mac’s motherboard dies? That means getting a ‘swap out’ or a repair, which means ‘down time.’

In the future, we’d like to run a couple of our own Xserves using Apple’s Remote Desktop. If you’ve ever set up and run a Linux server or any Unix-like server, Apple’s remote set up and management is a breeze in comparison. That’s our goal. For now, we’re very pleased with ServerLogistics’ Xserve performance.

How Does Mac360 Set Up OS X Server

2006-09-14T20:02:13-06:00

I’m curious to know how you implement Mac360 on OS X Server. What versions of PHP, MySQL and other apps are you using, as I noticed a few things on the Mac360 site that don’t normall come with vanilla OS X or Server.

I manage a number of Linux servers, Windows servers, and a few older Mac servers for the State of Georgia.

Hey, I saw Mac 360 on DIGG!!

2007-09-21T12:02:03-06:00

I saw Mac 360 on Digg this week in the Apple section. That usually means a lot of hits to a web site. How did the Mac hold up under the onslaught from Geekdom?

The Digg Effect

2006-10-20T15:31:07-06:00

One of our Mac360 articles was picked up on Digg early Friday. Digg is a techno geeko community that searches the web for interesting articles, news, etc., and promotes the link in a heirarchical voting system.

When a site’s article or link appears on Digg, thousands of online users will click to the site to see wassup and comment.

Lemmings?

Kate’s article on iTV and Sling was featured on Digg and received plenty of comments, some worthy, some not.

The Digg Effect of heavy traffic to a site featured on Digg resulted in a little slower access to Mac360 Friday morning, as bandwidth was maxed out. The PowerMac continued to work fine, though. I’ve enclosed a couple of graphs that truly highlight the Digg Effect on a server.

6.6 Quake Rocks Hawaii. Knocks Mac360 Offline

2006-10-16T06:58:16-06:00

The strongest earthquake in over 20 years struck the Hawaiian islands early Sunday.

Power was disrupted for more than 12 hours on Oahu, home to Honolulu, Waikiki, and Mac360’s web server.

The 6.6 magnitude quake caused massive blackouts on three islands, landslides on Hawaii, and forced thousands of visitors to flee their hotels.

There were no reports of casualties, though Mac360, running on a PowerMac G5 server in central Honolulu, was offline for 12 hours.

The quake struck the Big Island of Hawaii shortly after 7:00 AM HST, then again about five minutes later near the island of Maui.

Initial reports indicated that the quake’s center was approximately 10 miles offshore from Waikoloa, Hawaii on the Big Island.

Within minutes the quake rattled across Maui and Oahu-- all power to Honolulu, Maui, and Hawaii was disrupted.

The islands of Lanai, Kauai, and Molokai were unaffected.

Mac360’s server has battery backup power which lasted a full three hours. Electrical power to much of Honolulu was out for over 12 hours.

The site was restored to internet access at approximately 10:45 PM HST.

Our Collection of Open Source

2006-09-11T20:56:17-06:00

Apple has embraced Open Source applications with Mac OS X and OS X Server. So have we.

Our collection consists of the basic server and web server applications. These include Postfix for email, Apache for web serving, PHP and MySQL for Open Source applications.

Mac OS X is a great platform for Open Source applications, even attractive commercial applications such as the pMachine CMS application Expression Engine, which powers Mac360.

Others on the list include these:

Joomla
Great Open Source application for content management. Lots of bells and whistles and a bit complicated for the novice user, but comes with many templates to change site design. Joomla.

WordPress
Another easy to install and use web log tool. This is one your mother can use. She could probably install it on a Mac, too. WordPress.

MAMP
It’s the Linux version of Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Great for getting started with the easy-to-install Open Source applications. Mamp.

Moodle
Nice learning management system. Surprising power, yet easy to set up. Moodle.

phpAdsNew
The premier PHP and MySQL banner advertising server application. Runs great on a Mac, easy to setup, administration is straightforward. Excellent community. AdsNew.

MediaWiki
If you like Wikipedia, you’ll like MediaWiki. It’s remarkable power in a simple package.

Coppermine
Want a huge photo gallery online? Coppermine is it. Many themes, easy setup, excellent price (free). Coppermine.

SugarCRM
Online customer relationship management. Simple set up for a complex application that can run customer management for a large company. Sugar.

We’ve got a larger list and will share those from time to time. Among commercial applications, we have a few favorites, too:

ExpressionEngine
This is the content management system that powers the most popular Mac web sites. Mac360 was the first to use it back in 2004. Not as easy as Joomla or WordPress, but MUCH more powerful. pMachine.

ChumpSoft
Polls and Surveys are cool on the Mac. We’ve used the polling software for years and it’s been rock solid. Customizable polls and surveys, all running on PHP and MySQL on your Mac. Affordably priced. ChumpSoft.

Active Campaign
Superb suite of customer service applications. Email and list management, help desk and support, company knowledgebase. Very professionally done, and affordable. ActiveCampaign.

There’s plenty of others, too. Forums applications from phpBB, Invision, and vBulletin, just to name a few. Lots of power, low cost.

Mac360 Service Outage

2006-09-11T20:36:46-06:00

This seemed like a good idea at the time…

Mac360 is hosted on our own Mac. As traffic has increased we’ve moved the site to a few Internet Web Site Hosts, but with less success than we’d like. The best was pMachine Hosting, the worst was Affinity & Host Save. Site 5 held great promise with their excellent suite of backend site administrator tools, but their systems are not geared for a site that actually uses the services they sell.

Mac360 has also run on an Apple iMac, a PowerMac G4, a PowerMac G5, even a Mac mini. It’s running on OS X Tiger Server on a PowerMac G5 now, and it’s likely we’ll keep it here for awhile. Why? It works. For the most part, OS X Server is very stable, not quite as fast a server as some versions of Linux, but the admin tools are excellent for the part-time system administrator.

This morning I set up a web mail account for the email server. Remarkably, the order of the domain names in Apache is important. Apache didn’t like my changes and httpd started crashing all over the place. Fortunately, I caught it quickly, used the backup config file, and all was OK.

Until I did it again.

This time Apache rewrote the config file and hosed my PHP settings (we don’t use the default PHP install with OS X Server). So, until I could figure it out, no database access. Most of our sites run on MySQL. Big problem. Then I checked the Apache modules and found the extra PHP module. Once I deleted that, all was good again.

And web mail works OK.

Whew. Sorry for the downtime. It wasn’t fun.

We also have a few Mac mini’s running as mail servers, web servers, and development servers for our collection of Open Source applications.