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by: Bernard Teo








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Sat 23 Jul 2005

Where do you want to go today?

Category : Commentary/wheretogo.txt

Okay, I'll borrow MS's slogan for Windows, and back up a little to reflect on where I'm trying to go with WebMon, DNS Enabler, and Postfix Enabler.

I've started building these things, initially, for myself. The web, mail, DNS, calendaring system, accounting system, integrated business database system, payments system - overlaid with security and encryption - these are what I think of as the life-sustaining elements of any business.

Of course, you've still got to go out and sell your wares. But these are the stuff you'll need to back you up, and they, in turn, need to work flawlessly and easily if you're going to channel all your energy towards making the products and services, and bringing in the revenue. And none towards feeding the system.

I'm making all these so that I can turn them all up quickly if I need to change a server, move to another home, another country, anywhere where they have an Internet connection.

I've got the web, the mail, calendaring and file sharing over WebDAV, DNS, and SSL done (or at least the basics). Coming on is the accounting system, and a way to snap on a PayPal payments interface, and link it to the accounting system. And tie in this no-frills blogging system with perhaps a GUI editor.

Currently Postfix Enabler and DNS Enabler lack the ability to help you migrate the data over from an older machine or system. I had thought that I've already eliminated a lot of things a person has remember. But I understand now that people would need a way to restore their previous configuration with just one click. After all, that was what I said was my stated goal - to get back on-line fast. I'm not there yet. It needs more work.

And some people have problems with PayPal. But believe me, I couldn't do this without PayPal - not if I'd like to get paid for sharing the tools and providing the support. I hope PayPal gets better because I don't have a better or cheaper alternative now, and I think they will get better.

So this is where I want to go. I hope that others will also find the tools useful and agree they're worth paying for, and that they could build their businesses on the Mac, which would be nice bonus because two years ago when I took this route it was really to find a non-IT business we could run, but with all our own tools, because Hai Hwee, my wife, and me got tired of working with PC-myopic IT managers, overseers/information architects, Windows, and all that corporate IT scene, and I wanted to be near our kid, and be a daddy rather than a wallet (as someone puts it).

And we're still looking for it - a business we could run like a high-performance machine - so that we, and everybody else working in it, could live our lives like human beings. But watching the payments coming in for Postfix Enabler has given us a glimpse that maybe, if anything, the underlying systems do actually work. And they can scale. And they're all running beautifully on the Mac. As I've argued they would. And so, on with the search, to build a real business on it.

Posted at 4:45AM UTC | permalink

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VPN Enabler for Mavericks

MailServe for Mavericks

DNS Enabler for Mavericks

DNS Agent for Mavericks

WebMon for Mavericks

Luca for Mavericks

Liya for Mountain Lion & Mavericks

Postfix Enabler for Tiger and Panther

Sendmail Enabler for Jaguar

Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:

  • Apache 2 Web Server
  • Postfix Mail Server
  • Dovecot IMAP Server
  • Fetchmail
  • SpamBayes Spam Filter
  • Procmail
  • BIND DNS Server
  • DNS Agent
  • WebDAV Server
  • VPN Server
  • PHP-based weblog
  • MySQL database
  • PostgreSQL database

all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks.