paddy159 Posted December 27, 2009 Share Posted December 27, 2009 Hello Everybody, At the moment I have a Linux home Server running on Ubuntu, But now I'm thinking about Snow Leopard Server. I will tell my needs, and I hope you can answer if my plans are possible with Snow Leopard Server: The Server is a P4 with 1Gb Ram and enough Disk Space. It has no Display and Keyboard, because of that only remote administration. I want to use the Server as - a Mailserver (IMAP) which fetches the Mails from a Freemail Provider and sorts it in different Mailboxes AND provides own Accounts (But the fetches are needed) The Mails should be saved on a raid - a Jabber-Server (Openfire) --} this should be no problem - Internet Connection Sharing ... No Problem I think - Data Sharing (Samba) ... No Problem Can I use the native Mailserver for my needs? Does I have to use ssh remote, or is it possible to share the servers Desktop? Regards Patrick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rwillett Posted December 27, 2009 Share Posted December 27, 2009 Hello Everybody,At the moment I have a Linux home Server running on Ubuntu, But now I'm thinking about Snow Leopard Server. I will tell my needs, and I hope you can answer if my plans are possible with Snow Leopard Server: The Server is a P4 with 1Gb Ram and enough Disk Space. It has no Display and Keyboard, because of that only remote administration. I want to use the Server as - a Mailserver (IMAP) which fetches the Mails from a Freemail Provider and sorts it in different Mailboxes AND provides own Accounts (But the fetches are needed) The Mails should be saved on a raid - a Jabber-Server (Openfire) --} this should be no problem - Internet Connection Sharing ... No Problem I think - Data Sharing (Samba) ... No Problem Can I use the native Mailserver for my needs? Does I have to use ssh remote, or is it possible to share the servers Desktop? Regards Patrick I have a Snow Leopard Server running on a Mac Mini. It's wholly legit, but I tried out various scenarios to see what was possible. I also know Linux pretty well and did have a Ubuntu running AFP. First of all, you can't run SLS on a P4 (AFAIK), you need a proper up to date processor, a P4 is very old. You also need 2GB of RAM. Mail is provided out of the SLS box. It's really Postfix under the hood and all the Postfix tutorials should work. No idea about Freemail but it sounds as is you have an SMTP server in front of you and then running some sort of fetch program to inject it back into Postfix. Sounds complex, difficult and non-standard to me. It's easier to run your own mail server and debug that than to debug a weird combination of Postfix, Fetch and god knows what else. The Apple mail server is fairly simple in that it has most of the easy stuff done through a graphics front end, though you still have to hack files for middle to complex stuff. Raid is fairly easy, but your costs are mounting up. Jabber is easy. Internet Connection - No idea. I would always shove a simple firewall in between anything and the Internet. Anybody who doesn't and relies on inbuilt firewalls deserves everything that happens to them. Samba works OK (I think), but I don't use Windows, only AFP and NFS. Since the file sharing is Samba it should be fine. You will need to check on Active Directory configuration though. Desktop sharing is easy, though not sure about desktop sharing between a SLS and a PC or Linux box. I use Macs for mine so works well. SSH is also good to have as you might (will) need to do command line stuff. If this is running on non-apple hardware I'd check very, very carefully the hardware you want to run as if it kernel panics you might lose everything. Whats your data worth to you? I played around with all of this and decided to buy Snow Leopard Server and run it on an older Intel Mac Mini. It works perfectly well and supports 2TB of disk with no effort at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Richard5 Posted December 28, 2009 Share Posted December 28, 2009 You might want to have a look at http://diymacserver.com, it has most of the information you require on setting up a server on a normal OS X version. If you can get the XCode stuff working on an OSX86 you will get it working on that one as well. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paddy159 Posted December 28, 2009 Author Share Posted December 28, 2009 Now I'm thinking about using 10.5 or 10.6 as the server OS ... What would you prefer? What Kernel is needed to install Snow Leo on a P4? Regards Patrick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rwillett Posted December 28, 2009 Share Posted December 28, 2009 Now I'm thinking about using 10.5 or 10.6 as the server OS ... What would you prefer? What Kernel is needed to install Snow Leo on a P4? Regards Patrick No idea I'm afraid, some versions of Leopard *may* work on older hardware, but I wouldn't trust an older CPU and a hacked Mac Server with my precious data. Not a helpful response from me, but I only have Snow Leopard Server and Snow Leopard on all my hardware. The diymacserver looks interesting, but I was only prepared to compromise on the Mac client, not on the Mac server software. I paid for Snow Leopard Server and don't regret it. It's certainly not perfect, indeed in many respects, it's less functionally rich than a decent CentOS server BUT it mostly just works with little input from me. Hacking a Mac OS Server to be reliable and work with my Mac clients was too much effort, a classic example is the Calendar Server. It's open sourced, but it does not work with Snow Leopard clients. I may look at the diymacserver again and see if it all works, but I'm in no hurry and spending dozens of hours getting it working just like a Snow Leopard Server is time I could spend earning money or better still, lazing at home YMMV though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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