[G4] Yes, we're back!

Tue Sep 15 15:16:07 PDT 2009

Dear Mr. Prentice:I wish to express my gratitude to the list members. I had an occasion to need assistance regarding a new monitor, and the advice I received was very useful. Here in South America there are few places to obtain equivalent help.Thank you again,Pedro Mejia 

--- On Tue, 15/9/09, Eric Prentice <eric at themacintoshguy.com> wrote:

From: Eric Prentice <eric at themacintoshguy.com>
Subject: [G4] Yes, we're back!
To: Automator at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, Bluetooth-Mac at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, BusMac at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, Cube at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, Dashboard at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, DigiCam at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, DuoList at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, FireWire at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, G4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, G5 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, HomeMac at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, iBook at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, iMac at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, iTunes at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, "A place to test the list software." <ListTest at listserver.themacintoshguy.com>, MacDV at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, MacGames at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, MacGPS at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, MacProAudio at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, MacUSB at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, MacVoice at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, PowerBook at listserver.themacintoshguy.com, Titanium at listserver.themacintoshguy.com,
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Date: Tuesday, 15 September, 2009, 1:56 PM

Hello List Members,
In case, you didn't notice, the lists at TheMacintoshGuy.com are back! ;-)

Many of you had noticed the lists slowing down over recent months and we'd seen some very long delays in trying to get mail processed. Unfortunately, the poor old XServe we were running on was having a really hard time keeping up. Our IT friends made some attempts to squeeze some life into the old server but as we dug into it, the poor machine just died. Perhaps years of 100% CPU activity wore the poor thing out.

So instead of messing with things too much, we went out and got a new machine, and started completely from scratch. We now have a new server with 10.6 and 64-bit compile of all the server software. (Read below if you want more details.)

With the new server, we're able to put more things in place that will help revitalize this community of lists. We're also looking at some new lists (iPhone, MacTablet, etc.) that will help get us into current areas of interest. We'll let you know when those are live.

I want to thank you all for the community you've created and I look forward to seeing it grow. It really is a special thing that we have all created here together.

We're planning on keeping the lists very open with very little moderation as they have been for the last 10+ years. We appreciate everything you do to keep the lists helpful, on topic, PG, and fun to be a part of. We will work on doing a better job of communicating what is going on. Unfortunately, the email addresses for the lists have been around for a long time and are popular with spammers apparently. While we do a great job of preventing any of that from getting through to the lists, it does keep the admin accounts and server pretty full of junk.

So, take a minute to see what other lists you might want to be a part of and start a discussion there. I was just looking and it looks like we're approaching the 11th anniversary of our oldest list later this month.
<http://www.themacintoshguy.com/lists/>

And for those who didn't know, I'm Eric Prentice, themacintoshguy.com was a site I started in the mid 90s for my Mac consulting business. Since then, I started Dr. Bott LLC, <http://www.drbott.net/> a distributor of accessories for the Apple market and that takes the majority of my focus. Dr. Bott LLC is kind enough to host the listserver and lend IT expertise to keeping it running. Our hope is that the new server will be a better platform to keep things running smoothly. If you have something you think we need to know, a email to the list admin addresses are always a good idea, lately you can also find me on Twitter. <http://twitter.com/tunaball>

Thank you for reading all this and being a part of the lists!

Eric

If you are into technical details from our IT friends, read on...

The old machine really had trouble coping with many many files combined in a single HFS directory. We considered re-purposing some existing hardware but decided if we're going to put in the effort, we might as well start with some fast hardware and the latest versions of all the applicable software.

This machine was loaded with 10.6.0 Snow Leopard (client). We went on to compile the current stable release of Mailman and configure Postfix. I'm excited to say that all the software components for the list server (Apache, Postfix, Python, Mailman) are running in native x86_64 mode. Woohoo!

System load and response time on the new server is obviously orders of magnitude faster than the previous server, an Xserve G4. Snow Leopard is still a x.0 release, so we realize there are a few minor glitches, but we didn't run into anything that we could not work around.

Some of the problems we ran into:
* SoftRAID (we love these guys, but it doesn't seem stable yet on 10.6)
* SNMP (wonky responses on some standard monitoring attributes)
* Default configurations more secure (Apple has adjusted some of the default settings for some services, tending to be more secure then previous OS versions. That is generally good, but requires a little extra sleuthing if you plan to install and operate software as documented for installing on 10.4 or 10.5)
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