The MacDeskBlog

This has taken me at least a month longer than I had hoped, but I’m finally ready to start beta testing the new main server. The new server is a Mac Mini provided by the folks at Visual Seed. Expect to see new ads from them soon. Images are still and will continue to be hosted by the good folks at Import GSM.

I’m heading off on vacation for the next week, or I would try to swap the new server into production. Of course, that would be somewhat foolish without more testing, so it’s probably a good thing that I didn’t get to this point two days ago.

Known issues on the new server:
1. ads may not always appear on the pages,
2. changing your site preferences might fail with a Couldn’t Connect to Database error,
3. site might be a little bit sluggish when fetching ads,
4. all blog related links will take you back to http://MacDesktops.com/ instead of leaving you on http://ws2.macdesktops.com/

Why those issues aren’t problems:
1. ad requests go through an ssh tunnel to the production database, which will reside on the new server.
2. database writes have the same limitation.
3. same thing.
4. limitation in WordPress. Won’t be an issue when ws1 becomes MacDesktops.com.

Please take a stroll through the new server. If it works well for you, feel free to use it instead of the production server. And if you encounter any other problems or odd behavior on the new server, please send me a note and head back to the production server. As always, you can reach me at the feedback address at macdesktops.com, even if the javascript mailto link doesn’t work.

The mail server migration is done. The “soft bouncing” functionality of postfix (the mail server included in Mac OS X Server these days) appears to have retained some (all?) of the previously undeliverable messages and delivered them once I straightened out the configuration.

I know some of you out there are running servers, and some of those are running Mac OS X Server or some flavor of Linux running postfix. So, I’ll share some of my experience. Initially, I just migrated one domain from my old Mac OS X 10.0 server to my new Mac OS X Server 10.4 machine. That migration was pretty simple and painless. I set up the new server for the macdesktops.com domain, changed DNS and mail started arriving on the new server.

I have several other domains for pet projects and for friends. When I tried to move them to the new server, things started to break down. My test messages didn’t get through, and some of them didn’t generate bounce messages. The main challenge I had over the past week was figuring out the correct settings for myhostname, mydomain, and virtual hosting. The conclusion I arrived at last night is that virtual hosting either doesn’t work, or is simply too counterintuitive for me to figure out using the limited documentation I was able to find and reference. Once I removed the new domains from the virtual hosting configuration and adding them into the host name aliases, everything started to work. Using the Server Admin utility for Mac OS X Server, this entailed navigating to Mail - Advanced - Hosting in the utility, then deleting each domain name from the lower text box on the screen before entering it into the upper text box, and finally unchecking the “Enable virtual hosting” checkbox.

If you find yourself configuring a new postfix environment, particularly in Mac OS X Server, I recommend trying to steer clear of virtual hosting. Instead, try to configure the server by adding in host name aliases rather than virtual hosting domains. Doing so should make the process much easier.

I’m migrating mail service from my old mail server to the new one. I moved the macdesktops.com domain already, and that process went pretty smoothly. As I figure out the configuration for secondary domains, mail might bounce for macdesktops.com as well. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. I hope that if you receive a bounce message, you attempt to resend the message again later. My greater worry at the moment is that some of my test messages appear to get delivered but then are not showing up when I retrieve mail.