Back in Business

post_00185_e-mail_icon.jpgOur server-side I.T. infrastructure is finally back up to nearly where it should be. Mail is now working reliably, and IMAP access has been restored to all its organized goodness. Some of our mail clients aren’t Mail.app now, and its a little annoying that other programs don’t provide easy ways to re-point your special IMAP folders — Thunderbird requires you to edit a Javascript file.
A quick run-down of what we’re running these days, for the interested geeks out there.
Apache + mySQL 5 are hosting the websites www.jonandnic.com, and services.jonandnic.com, the latter providing additional services (hence the domain name) for our own use.
WordPress 2.2.2 continues to run www.jonandnic.com.
IIS + SQL Server is running old.jonandnic.com, and will continue to do so until the box its running on dies of old age.
Some unnamed IMAP extension is running our mail. It works pretty good but makes a special folder called “mbox” that my iPhone refuses to ignore, and you cannot delete (without destroying all your mail). All other mail clients ignore it by default, so I guess this isn’t that unusual. I wish there were more configuration I could do, but beggars can’t be choosers.
Google Apps remains the back-up MX for mail sent to jonandnic.com
RoundCube makes a decent webmail client, once you find the main.inc.php file and edit it to your liking.
mod_dav, the WebDAV extension for Apache, will provide our Calendar hosting. With PHP iCalendar providing web access.
Our personal e-mail addresses remain the same, and I promise your mail won’t get lost if you write us now! The best part is, now that our hosting is off-site, mail and the website are not affected by local power/Internet outages (which our little town seems to have plenty of.) It also means moving days are a lot less stressful.
Our client machines are evenly split between Macs and PCs, with the former running Mail.app + iCal, while the latter will be using Thunderbird + Sunbird. There’s a little work to be done yet on this side of things — our home media network also suffered a little with all these changes, but I expect to have our digital communications and entertainment utopia back up and running within a couple weeks.
Update: I don’t yet have a solution for sharing Address Book data across 4 computers and an iPhone. Anyone have any suggestions? I’m using Address Book.app’s vCard format…

One thought on “Back in Business

  1. Address-o-Matic sounds like it could be a good solution for you. It allows for Bonjour sharing of your address book in an iTunes/iPhoto style format. You can choose which groups to share and which to subscribe to so Nicole doesn’t end up with all your work contacts. As for the iPhone, I would just stick with iTunes/Address book syncronization. The single user license is $20 but I think it has a full version trial.

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