Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Instant server, just add Mac

For a long time Apple have sold a specialised version of MacOS targeted at servers, which goes by the unsurprising name of MacOS Server. It generally comes bundled with server-grade machines (which right now means the XServe), but if you need to buy it seperately it's pricey - £399 for the 10-client version or £799 for the unlimited-users version.

It's a good product - it does mail, file service, DHCP, you name it - and mostly uses the same open-source tools which power a lot of the Internet. The magic, however, is in Apple's custom administration tools, and that's also how the price tag is justified. If you're running a large network it's just the ticket.

But how about if you just want a home mail server or whatever? The Mac mini is an excellent candidate for those looking for a microserver which can just sit unnoticed in a corner - it's tiny, it's aesthetically pleasing, and it operates headless (without a keyboard or monitor) without batting an eyelid. Its main drawback is the relatively slow 4200rpm hard drive, but for low-demand applications that isn't really a problem.

The mini will run OS X Server, but it seems a little weird to spend the same amount as the cost of the machine itself again just to provide lightweight mail and web services for a home or small office network. At the same time, large parts of OS X Server are made up of open-source software. Its mail server uses Postfix and Cyrus, while its webmail system is, I understand, based on SquirrelMail. Some other things, such as web and DNS services, are already installed and just need a few tweaks.

However, compiling and installing things like Cyrus from scratch can be a real pain, and MacOS X isn't necessarily an easy platform to work with when building some bits of UNIX software - it can be time-consuming and fiddly to figure things out from scratch. Such things are generally well beyond the reach of the average user who doesn't like the command line, wrestling with compilers and autoconf, or editing cryptic configuration files. So I thought I'd see if it was possible to build an easily-installable binary distribution to provide basic network services on a MacOS X machine without excessive fiddling and for free.

After a couple of days of hacking I've more or less managed to do just that, and have produced the first version of a ready-to-install binary package which can be installed (using the OS X installer) easily, and which then requires the editing of a couple of files and a couple of other steps to make it work. It installs Cyrus (including saslauthd, as PAM is the order of the day) and SquirrelMail for an instant webmail and IMAP server. I've tested it on a virgin installation of Panther and it works fine - instant mail server!

As I said above, there's no pretty configurator yet so it's still necessary to edit a couple of files to and jump through a Cyrus-mailbox-creation hoop, but that's still an order of magnitude easier than building and installing it yourself.

It's good enough for a provisional tentative this-is-how-it-works release - if you want a copy, then help yourself (19MB .dmg). While there are a couple of similiar packages out there, this is 100% freeware. Enjoy.

Future plans include adding extra services to make it a more fully-featured server package and, first and foremost, a configurator to take care of the trivial bits of administration which need to be done at install time, especially the Cyrus administration stuff (additional users still have to have their mailboxes created manually with cyradm).

Posted by mpk at February 8, 2005 3:30 PM | TrackBack