First of all: Sorry! This site appeared and disappeared a few times in the last few days and there was honestly no change to the design here, yet. It’s not that easy to split out my previously main domain into so much pieces for different applications that are running using the klein2-domain, so finally I end up in pushing this site to the very common www.klein2.de

But why does all this happend? Well, it all began in December last year, when I did the switch from Windows to Macs. I had the (in my mind) fancy idea to own a Mac mini Snow Leopard server to use it for different stuff, like sharing calendars (with the pro of having one of the rare web calendars for Darwin calendars), doing web hosting for projects locally, having a local (and secured through software RAID1) mailserver with rules and so on.

The Apple website describes a lot, but also misses a few things that really made me feel nuts after some days of configuring this “super easy to set up server”. I’ve bought a big book about the Snow Leopard server, got a video tutorial with very great descriptions plus I already have what I would call a solid background in network knowledge.

Having the Mac mini server installed in the basement and on top of the 19″ rack, cabled with all together 9.5TB of external harddisks, I found myself in the middle of a very bad environment, called Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server. Being spoiled a lot by the client system, it was a shock (ok more or less, because Apple in the last years often delivers “banana products”) that the following things do NOT work:

• iPhone push services (this includes EVERYTHING from calendar to mail to contacts)
• address book usage on the iPhone (as a support guy from the enterprise time confirmed today “No, the current iPhone version is not compatible with the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server, because it lacks of CardDAV support)
• iCal entries are NOT real-time and yes, you will have the sync them over the air. The commercial site describes it a “bit” different.

But these are all topics regarding the iPhone. I’m sorry, I had the funny idea to come out of a meeting with a customer, “sliding on” my iPhone and seeing that I’ll have another appointment in a few minutes where I should drive through, got this new appointment from another customer. Just as an example what I had expected when I spend 1.070 € on this server (incl. the AppleCare to have the enterprise support).

No, this does not work, but what really makes me nuts (again, I’m a snickers meanwhile) was that it’s still NOT possible to accept Outlook invitations for example, or even being able to receive and send invitations with co-workers who have their accounts on the same Mac mini server!? I mean, how hard could it be? I’ve tried it with Google Mail and… surprise! I was able to successfully accept, decline and “maybe” appointments with their web interface.

Enough of the rude words, some stuff worked fine. No! Not the software update, a service that was abandoned by me after some more grey hairs on my head and 4 days of… you know what – feeling like a snickers…

This story has a happy end – believe it or not. More or less 1 month ago, I received the Mac mini server, hugged it and gave him a warm welcome in this home… I’ve spoken to Apple today and the agreed to pay out the last 35 months of AppleCare onto my bank account. The dealer was even more accommodating when they agreed to let me return the Mac mini server to them and get the full refund. Very nice and I highly appreciate that.

So, what’s next? Hey guys, you know me. I love to create new ideas and I’m still on the hunt for the perfect storage to store our meanwhile around 2TB of needed data safely.

Remember end of last year, when I got this Intel mainboard, or used to paint this case white in a very professional way and put some fancy “dieta’s opensolaris server” stickers onto? Yeah, well – it seems like I rewind the time a bit and start from there over again. Today I’ve ordered an AMD X2 240e CPU (max. 45W of power), a mainboard which also supports DDR3-1066 ECC memory from ASUS and an Intel Gigabit CT Desktop PCIe x1 network card. This all will be attached into my silver Chieftec case (midi) which allows me to put in 6x 1TB HDs + the special for the last project bought 160GB IDE HD for the system. And guess what – I will use OpenSolaris!

The arguments of ZFS are way too good to ignore them, so I will run it. I’ve played around with OpenSolaris in a Sun VirtualBox today and I was amazed how nice it is. Completely different from systems that I’ve run before, but it’s in some parts a bit easier than Debian.

I’m excited to post more about this in the next weeks and I’m also VERY excited to see if this will be the final solution for my storage. Of course I will place the OpenSolaris server in the basement.

A special thanks to Constantin Gonzalez from Sun for giving me very good hints and tips today via twitter about which hardware should work and how to set up the ZFS pool itself.

Ciao
Dennis