| The Ultimate Business Machine Technology, business And, not least, about by: Bernard Teo
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Fri 12 Sep 2003 Yet another PC Guy goes MacCategory : Commentary/computerworldguygoesmac.txt From InfoWorld to ComputerWorld, yet another PC guy goes Mac. The thing about these conversions is that these are probably the guys who were most vociferously anti-Mac in the days of OS 9. How can I tell? Well, the first thing he recommends you do is to activate the OS X firewall. After all, he found the Mac after a search for an easy to use and secure operating system. And he writes a book, "Securing the Network from Malicious Code." The first thing a real Mac user does, in the days of OS 9, is to create a printed page and experiment with all the fonts and the layout, and dream about impressing the boss or the client with all the printed stuff, viruses and hackers be damned. But try to get another Mac into the department? Not if the IT guy can help it. I've gone through all these fights. Come on, Apple. Play the game well. You're going to get a stab at the huge enterprise market. Just don't lose it this time. It may be your last. Thu 11 Sep 2003 Otterman's BlogCategory : Commentary/sivablog.txt My friend Siva the Otterman has been filling up his weblog lately. I've just been too busy to notice. I've always enjoyed reading his posts to the local Mac Users' Group and felt that he is one person who should write a blog. So here it is, at last. You'll get a feel for what's going on up there at the National University of Singapore, and he is into conservation and nature, and biking, and stuff like that. Definitely off the beaten track, and you may just find a place or two you don't even know exist in Singapore. Notable QuotesCategory : Commentary/timhoward.txt I like this quote from Tim Howard, Manchester United's solid new goalkeeper, comparing life in the English Football League with his old one in the United States. "When you're at Manchester United, everything is scrutinised, every little thing. There's a pressure to perform every day that is greater. Pressure can bust pipes or make diamonds. I turn that pressure into something I can enjoy. "The real unfortunate part is when I make the saves it's 'brilliant save by Howard'. When I make a mistake, it's 'the American has a lot to learn'. You could get consumed by that, but you have to let it slide off your back." I love that - 'you can get consumed by that, but you have to let it slide your back'. Tim Howard looks tough enough, mentally, to stay up with the Roy Keanes of the world, and that's alright with me. On the subject of United, I've just finished a book I salvaged from the discards, "Manchester Unlimited, The Money, Egos, and Infighting Behind the World's Richest Football Club" by Mihir Bose. Interesting views of football as serious business, especially if you're soccer fan like me. Best three bucks I've spent lately. Now, how about the Triads as a serious business? I'm enjoying Timothy Mo's "Sour Sweet" about life in Chinese Soho in the sixties, which I bought umpteen years ago but which I've only just managed to find time to read. This is really the purpose of this weblog - to figure out how to get close to running the ideal business, from learning from all these different perspectives. Will IT see the light?Category : Commentary/CTOswitcher.txt Following on from the last posting. I just came across this. This is the CTO of InfoWorld, talking about how a Mac running OS X successfully replaced both a PC and a Linux server in the setup he has at his home, and how this experience has forced him to re-examine his preconceptions. Contrast this with an article he wrote back in January, which is typical of the kind of IT mindset that has boxed the Mac into irrelevancy, as far as the enterprise is concerned. It's like when you're sailing. Often the first inkling that the wind has changed comes from the tiny ripples around the boat. It's interesting to watch these events unfolding. Even as we're talking, many OS 9 users still have to be dragged kicking and screaming into OS X and Unix. So they're too busy grumbling to notice that the Mac is starting to get the respect they've always wished was there, so that they can get support they've always wanted. Tue 09 Sep 2003 Alice in WonderlandCategory : Technology/aliceinwonderland.txt I've got a version of Postfix compiled to support SMTP-AUTH. I'm getting quite close to making it all work. But I couldn't quite make the saslpasswd2 command work with the rest of OS X's built-in SASL libraries and I don't want to have to override anything built-in. A search through Google shows that, as usual, there are others with the same problem and, also as usual, no sign of a solution. So I thought of avoiding sasldb and using pam, and that's where I had a sensation of falling through a trap-door. It has led me to a discovery of Apple's efforts at integrating directory access - to support centralized network repositories for users, groups, passwords, security policy and other administrative data. What this means to an end-user is that you only need to make a single sign-on to your system, and from there you will be granted access to every service imagineable, either on your own machine or across the network, that you have the rights to. Apple calls this Open Directory and, because it is designed to work with Microsoft's Active Directory, your single log-on gets you access to both Mac and Windows environments. It makes it easy for the end user - you don't have to remember passwords for every service, e.g., for your mail, corporate and departmental web sites, databases, file servers, etc - and it also makes it easier for a systems administrator - he only needs to go to one place to update the access rights. Michael Bartosh has a an excellent series of articles on MacDevCenter and this is just the start. Reading all these remind me of when I was wading through the Active Directory documentation. There's a lot of meat and you can start to believe that you may just have the tools to control the complexity of operations if the system needs to scale to match the size of a large enterprise. I'm contrasting this feeling with the response I got from a message I sent out to a local Mac users' group about using the Terminal and the sudo command to delete stubborn files from the Trash. There's a general grumbling from OS 9 users about the loss of simplicity. I remember going through this phase too as I read MacFixit comments about the sudo command when I first tried out OS X Public Beta. I remember thinking that this contraption from NeXT may have a hard time trying to fly. I don't know when I became a full convert to OS X but it may be close to the time I got MySQL runnning, for which I remain eternally grateful to Marc Liyanage. (If there's anything I feel good about doing Sendmail Enabler, it's that he's actually got a link to the Sendmail Enabler page from his PHP page). So the point I'm getting at is that Mac OS X is getting enormously powerful. And, increasingly relevant to an enterprise. There's going to be a point where the corporate IT guys are going to realise that, hey, there are a lot of fun stuff in there in OS X for them to play with, too. And they may just want to get in. There's when the tide will start to turn for Apple in the enterprise market. But then again, I may be wrong. All I know is that, we're not in Kansas anymore. Thu 04 Sep 2003 Postfix works greatCategory : Technology/postfixworksgreat.txt A couple of things that have made sendmail a pain to use are : on some machines you have to restart sendmail manually even after a reboot, and you have to restart sendmail whenever your IP address changes (if you're on a dynamically assigned IP address). Postfix seems to have none of these problems. Apple's probably made the right decision to go with Postfix. Plus it's a cleaner design. So here's looking forward to Panther. (Trying the SMTP-AUTH feature next). Wed 03 Sep 2003 DNS EnablerCategory : Technology/dnsenabler.txt Finally had enough time to finish up a basic DNS Enabler for the Airport Base Station tutorial. Had enough people writing in for it, so I might as well just finish it. This used to be bundled with Sendmail Enabler. Now that it's "unbundled", it may be possible to give it more "features". Well, maybe... Tue 02 Sep 2003 Postfix on PantherCategory : Technology/postfixpanther.txt We've got Postfix running on Panther. Actually, one of our Titaniums had a hard disk crash, and so we just installed our seed copy of Panther on it. I believe we're on a non-disclosure agreement and so can't say much about Panther. But Postfix on Panther is nice. Seems to not need a restart when the machine boots up. Also doesn't need a reboot whenever the machine's IP address changes. These two "features" alone will make it worth the switch to Postfix from sendmail. Needs more testing. Sat 30 Aug 2003 Tons of WorkCategory : Commentary/tonsofwork.txt Since I made the decision to stop doing pro bono server trouble-shooting for people, I've managed to get tons of my own work done. Does doing shareware pay? I'm not so sure. For all the time I spent designing the software, testing it, writing the documentation, and then answering all the questions, only about 25 people bothered to pay the shareware fee (making a grand total income of $250) - out of about 8,000 to 10,000 downloads. One would have thought that the ability to help people do something they couldn't do for months would be better valued. A couple of observations about these 25 people. Most didn't even need help. They just paid (a lot of others who took up the most time never did). And they were mostly from France. Thanks. So, this needs more thought, though it's definitely a great experience. There's a fine line between wanting to help the platform grow, and the need to watch over the health of your own business. It's better to keep things on an even keel. On a related matter, I've got Postfix running in Jaguar on one server, as well as on my iBook which I lug around everywhere. It's truly a "drop-in" replacement for sendmail. And I've got a copy of Panther, courtesy of Ernest P. The question is? Does Postfix on Panther even need an Enabler? At this point, if you just want to send mail out and you're handy with the command line, I don't really think so. But I did blow a large chunk of the $250 on Postfix and DNS books and three weeks reading them. Running a full-fledged mail server (with incoming and outgoing streams, and the need to get things like DNS right) is always going to be a different proposition. It may be better to help people understand the difference right from the start. Wed 20 Aug 2003 The Ultimate Business Machine ReduxCategory : Commentary/TUBRedux.txt The idea of the The Ultimate Business Machine works on three levels. On one level, it refers to the Mac, which I believe to be the ultimate business machine. You can use just this one machine to support the widest range of activities you are likely to find in the course of running a business. Don't think so? Think about Photoshop, the Office Suite, FreeHand, Keynote, Sound Studio, Maya, MySQL, Java, Apache, and of course sendmail. I think the tide is turning for Apple and the Mac, and I believe they deserve all the recognition that they're starting to get from places like ComputerWorld (Mac Myths and IT), InfoWorld (see The Mac Observer's summary of the InfoWorld coverage), and even Robert X Cringely (from the Pulpit). On another level, The Ultimate Business Machine refers to the way a business (or any business) ought to be run. Like a MacDonald's. Smoothly, efficiently, scaleable and cloneable. So that the owners don't have to be there all the time to make the business run. To achieve that, you need to have good systems. And, since computer systems form a large part of those, you need to watch what you're doing here. As Cringely puts it, "Ideally, the IT department ought to recommend the best computer for the job, but more often than not, they recommend the best computer for the IT department's job." You need good computing tools to build the best businesses. If you're competing head-on with another company, it's possible you can come out ahead, using the Mac. Don't think so? Let's say, I'm helping a company set up a mail server, web server, e-commerce server, accounting system, etc, and I'm equipped with tools like the one-click Sendmail Enabler, DNS Enabler, etc. And the other guys are using the type-a-lot Linux and Windows systems. Guess who gets done first and so gets to spend more time looking into the business workflows and issues? Finally, on the third level, the Ultimate Business Machine refers to the business I want to build. So it'll work even when I'm not there. And I would be in no position to give other people advice on how to run healthy, profitable businesses, if I run my own as a loss-making concern. The enduring image I have in my mind is the one depicted by Michael E. Gerber in the E-Myth Revisited (why most small businesses don't work) - when he described the harried owner of a bakery shop, chained to her business, getting close to breakdown. I've lived through that horror. I'm reminded of that feeling again, these last couple of weeks. So, we've got to get back to building a machine of our own. Tue 19 Aug 2003 Wrapping up sendmailCategory : Commentary/sendmailstumped.txt SMTP-AUTH refuses to work this time. It's funny. I got this part woking before. Then I went on and did a little bit more. But I can't remember what. I remember leaving it in an indeterminate state. Now even the basic stuff refuses to work. This makes three the number of things in sendmail that have left me stumped. Maybe it's time to put this aside for a while. There are a lot of other stuff waiting to be done. Goodbye, sendmail, at least for a while. Mon 18 Aug 2003 Breaking a few rice bowlsCategory : Commentary/ricebowl.txt "Love these guys" who leave their two cents worth in versiontracker. Great idea, and good functionality, but I'm stumped over the instructions ie: "Enter the server's URL". What URL? What Server? The instructions seem to assume that I have an Airport network, and don't explain how to set this up without one. Please, just a little more info. Okay, so I did go back and try a bit harder on the documentation, but do they realise how subversive this whole effort really is? It may break a few rice bowls, as the Chinese like to say. To follow this trend of thought, read Robert X Cringely, who asks the popular question, "Why aren't Apple Macintosh computers more popular in large mainstream organizations?" As MacDailyNews sums it all up, "IT Hates Macs because Macs reduce IT head count." Read more ... |
Mac@Work
Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:
all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks. |
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