I just noticed something interesting.

This Topic is entitled “Alexis’ First Time.” Lots of opportunity for innuendo and comment there; given her photo, of course. 20 posts and 176 views.

The Topic “Money. It’s All About The Money” garnered 20 posts also. But a whopping 688 (as of now) views.

What’s that say?

Tera Patricks - 28 July 2005 01:28 PM

[Fink] allows access to a bucket full of open source applications, most of which are painful to install, have nominal value (even for the user who wants to ‘venture’ into more of what OS X can do).

[snip]… My experience with Fink (and observation of others) says that stability and the app that does the job and gets out of the way are lacking.

Like I said, it’s for the folks that really want to go nuts with open source software.

Yeah, there’s a whole ton of programs in there which are not terribly useful, especially when compared with MacOS X. (Install Midnight Commander when I have the Finder?! As if!) However, the command line is not an evil place to spend some time. There’s a simplicity and reliability to the quality CLI applications that is hard to beat.

And calling them an old Chevy is just insulting. A lot of those programs are under active development and have some amazingly powerful functionality. Rsync may be one of the best backup/synchronization utilities ever. No GUI (well, except for X11—which Apple’s done a darn good job of integrating into the OS), it’s true, but there’s still a lot good stuff.

But anyhow....

What does Fink do that’s worthy?

What fink does is mitigate or completely eliminate some of the pain of downloading, configuring, building and installing all this open source goodness.

Say, for example, that you’re installing… I don’t know… A defect tracker to keep track of your development projects. The tracker requires the latest version of Apache, the latest version of PHP, a MySQL database, and a handful of PERL modules.

Yup, you COULD go download and install a bunch of .pkg installers from various folks on the web. So you do that. And you get it running.

Then it’s time to upgrade MySQL. Damn. That custom installer package actually deletes all your databases. Crud.

Or, what if you used Fink? It would build each item from the source code (takes a while) and then keep track of all those programs and whether they were up to date. Moreover, it keeps track of dependencies so that you don’t run your new PERL extension without a compatible version of PHP.

Think of it as somewhere between Mac-like ease of use, and Unix-head tinkering.

Most of what I, personally, use Fink for is some task-specific apps which I don’t need frequently enough to want to pay for them. I use ethereal to monitor network traffic (invaluable for debugging networks and checking connectivity), Ruby is quickly becoming my scripting language of choice and I keep it up to date with Fink, and I also use it to keep my PostgreSQL installation up to date.

Works pretty well for me. Don’t fear the command line, there’s a lot of Linux folks out there who get their work done 24/7 via the command line and a few X11 apps. Just because they aren’t all Aqualicious it doesn’t mean they aren’t powerful or useful.

I use Fink the same way - just for Ethereal (which ROCKS!).  I used it at work a couple of times on my PowerBook to track down a problem, and soon the Operations department was loading it up on machines everywhere, and abandoning the incomprehensible big $$$ package we bought.  No one can make it work (well, except for the Data Comm people they laid off or who quit).  You can solve a LOT of LAN problems with a good sniffer, and Ethereal is VERY good.  Most of the rest of the stuff available isn’t very useful when you have OS X.

Here’s my question.  It’s been a couple months.  Are you still running your servers on the mini?  How’s it performing?

I DO worry about the longevity of the laptop HDs they use in those boxes.

I recently moved my servers off my G5 to a dedicated hosting provider (Serverpronto.com) which had a great deal: $30/month for a dedicated linux box.  The unforunate part is that their service is nonexistant.  Their tech department is lazy and unresponsive.  And they have hardware that crashes, and when you open a ticket to report that their hardware has crashed, they charge you for the ticket!!

So I am thinking about taking back my servers, but I don’t want to host them on my G5, which I want to be free to upgrade at will without fearing breaking packages.

So how’s the mini holding up??

Steve

You could always get an external FW drive to use as the primary, and use the Mini’s drive as your backup unit.  I use an iMac G5 as my server right now, and have external drives for both the boot and backup drives.  Having the boot drive external makes it very easy to swap in another system if need be, too - just shut down, swap systems, and boot from the external drive.  I did this once when I needed to take the iMac out for repairs for a few hours - I just put my PowerBook in its place for awhile.

OS X Tiger rocks as a server, and on almost any Mac that can hold Tiger.

Click Here for a look at what I did with MAMP and EE. The design is Ron’s. He wouldn’t let me change it, but the color scheme is mine. It’s hot!

The server is a stock $499 Mac mini running the original install of OS X Tiger. I upgraded Tiger to get all the applications current, then added a few more to handle the server and mail chores.

PHP
OS X Tiger comes with PHP built in. It just needs to be turned on by adding a few lines to Apache. Or, you can download Marc Liyanage’s PHP for Mac OS X from Here. Marc adds a few packages to a build of PHP, including the popular GD2 libraries (not in Tiger). Plus, it’s a click, click, click install. No mucking. And free.

MySQL
MySQL is a powerful, popular, Open Source database which works great in Mac OS X.
Click Here for the MySQL site. Download the Mac OS X version and install. Click, click, click; though you need to install a config file in /etc/my.cnf. Read the instructions.

Use Tiger’s System Preferences to turn on all the Firewall security options. If you want a mail server, OS X comes with the popular, secure, stable Postfix. Buy a book on Postfix to get it running, or us in the point and click crowd, I highly recommend Postfix Enabler which gets you mail with clicks. Fast.

From there, I had a full Mac OS X server running Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Postfix mail.

Other apps I use include phpMyAdmin to manage MySQL remotely, FG Permission to handle unix file permissions (easy and free), and TextWrangler for text editing.

Oh, Cronnix can be handy, too, though requires ‘thinking’ to figure out times and dates for scheduled cron jobs.

Now, will the Mac mini hold up as a server? Ron tells me, for what I want to use it for, it will be just fine, though a bit slow when the hard drive gets hammered (trust me, that hasn’t happened). Extra hard drive speed can be gained by adding an external Firewire drive, cloning OS X Tiger to the external, then booting off the external.

As to longevity of a laptop hard drive, Jack wrote an article on changing the drive in his PowerBook. He said it ran 24/7 non-stop for about 30 months. Obviously, your mileage may vary.

Having the mini run off an external HD gives you lots of ‘emergency’ options, though, provided you clone back to the mini’s internal drive.

Enjoy.

Alexis Kayhill - 16 September 2005 03:26 PM

Click Here for a look at what I did with MAMP and EE. The design is Ron’s. He wouldn’t let me change it, but the color scheme is mine. It’s hot!

Cute. All that’s running off a Mac mini? Cool.

I’m more interested in knowing how you’re getting the Google ads displayed on the site and in the forums.

Tera Patricks - 28 July 2005 01:28 PM

Jeff Mincey - 28 July 2005 12:40 PM

“And lastly, but not leastly, if you wanna go nuts with open source stuff, download Fink.” For those who don’t know, the “open source stuff” accessible via Fink is confined exclusively to UNIX command shells and the X11 windows environment. You cannot get Quartz/Aqua software in this way.

What does Fink do that’s worthy?

Granted, it allows access to a bucket full of open source applications, most of which are painful to install, have nominal value (even for the user who wants to ‘venture’ into more of what OS X can do). That brings up another issue. Stability.

My list of ‘must haves’ for OS X include: stability, security, durability, dependability, and a host of applications that do a job and get out of the way. Pretty much like OS X itself, and predecessors Mac OS 9/8/7.x. My experience with Fink (and observation of others) says that stability and the app that does the job and gets out of the way are lacking.

I have not found much pleasure in Fink or many of the applications which require Fink to operate. My view of this is that it’s a 1956 Ford or ‘57 Chevy for the 21st century. For guys in the 60s, there were old cars that just needed tinkering with all the time. Something was 1) always broken, 2) about to break and needed ‘fixin’, 3) add this to make it run better, and so on. You get the idea.

Fink and all those OS apps that do such cool things are more for tinkering than desktop use. It’s a struggle to show people how to set up Apache, PHP, and MySQL, let alone venturing into the innards of something they won’t be able to fix themselves.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

OK, I agree that fink and the applications it manages are .... well ... not for everyone. But there is at least one app (and its aqua and not Xwindows although there is an xwindows version) and that is Lyx. It is totally free and is a front end to the whole Tex/Latex typsetting thingy. It you need to make your documents look good (ie not produced my MS Word or most other ordinary word processors) then you should take a look at Lyx. It is especially good at technical writing .. especially math. But I remember awhile ago wanting to send a letter to a person and wanting it to look really good. I fired up Lyx and there it was! Lyx is also interesting because it presents a whole new paradigm for how a “word processor” should work. I won’t go into this too far except to say that Lyx lets the writer focus on content, while Lyx focuses on how things are going to look on the page. MS Word makes a really pathetic attempt at this throught the use of what it calls “styles”. Framemaker does a better job, but Mac support has been withdrawn and it is way expensive. So check out Lyx.