im-roberto

I’m going to be making a small server for my house to hold all my music files, as well as serve my TimeMachine backups for my Macbook. This server is also going to be more than that, being a geeky kind of guy that likes to try out several different things I also plan on adding a full fledged web server with the works “LAMP,” and possibly Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately none of the home servers sold have these capabilities or the ability to add custom software to them, aside from that their price point is a little hefty compared to buying the parts and building it yourself. Besides Linux is free, and very customizable.

So over the weekend I went out and bought a 1.5 terabyte hard drive at Frys Electronics for $130, and purchased a case, and stick of memory from New Egg under $70. Now I just need to go out and purchase the motherboard and CPU that will be the heart and brains of this. I’ve decided on going with an ATOM based CPU mainly because it does require much power (go green!) and fits in a small ITX case.

The only dilemma I am now having is trying to decide on what Linux flavor I am going to be using for this server. I’ve been doing a little bit of testing using VMWare and Fedora 10 on getting Netatalk and TimeMachine working together but have not succeeded in the task. I have had a little more success using Ubuntu and a small tutorial I found online on how to get it running, except that Ubuntu does not come with the installation packages for a LAMP server as an option during the initial installation, which will cost me more time than if I were to use Fedora. I can always go with the Ubuntu server option but I plan on keeping a Gnome gui set up on the Linux box just in case if in the future I decide on adding Boxee, Miro, or some other online media software of that type.

Of course this will be an on going project and I will do my best to keep all changes made and hopefully some pictures while building it posted on the site.

Update: added links to its respected sites

Exactly a month after I purchased my iPhone I recieve an e-mail from Best Buy’s Rewardszone membership with this insane deal on the iPhone for those who are Premier Silver members since last year. In order to get the Premier Member status you have to spend over $2,500 in Best Buy stores but if you have their Mastercard you can qualify by spending that same money anywhere. If only I knew they would have this crazy deal I would have waited a month and gotten $100 discount, oh well im still happy with my new iPhone. Hopefully there will be better offers than this later this year.

Today I was playing around with a few php scripts that I’ve been writing to automate a couple of things on another web host. I also wanted to test them out and see them live before I uploaded them onto  my web space. I could have easily just ran MAMP on my computer and just got around the obstacle that way but I’d figure that OS X comes pre-installed with Apache and PHP and might as well make use of it. I made a quick search and came across the FoundationPHP book site which details on how to do this as well as shows images of the process and basically just simplifies it as best as possible.

Enabling PHP and Apache in Leopard

What can probably be done in order to complete this whole Sync circle of services that I have going is possibly set up Google Sync on my iPhone, then once all my contacts have been cleared is sync my iPhone with my Mac’s Address Book.app and if all goes well I will have my Plaxo contacts in Sync with my iPhone and from my iPhone have my Gmail contacts Synchronized as well and therefore closing that circle that Plaxo can’t do because Gmail Contacts are only Uni-Directional Sync with Plaxo. Holy smokes that was a mouthful. In any case, I have not yet tried this connecting this chain of services yet and will keep posted on it.

Yesterday I experimented with what I had mentioned on my blog post on trying to get a complete circle of sync complete but unfortunately I found out right after I posted my idea that it was not a valid one. Once after I had set up Google Sync on my iPhone I was no longer able to sync my address book or calendar using the iTunes sync because Google sync works with the MS Exchange protocol. There are various other work arounds to get it all working together but unfortunately they either require you to do some hacking on your mac, or that you use an additional software to get the sync done.

In order to do this you will need to buy Spanning Sync and set it up to sync with GMail, or you can use the hack to fool your mac into thinking it has a iPhone plugged in. I have already tried setting up the sync using the MS Exchange option on the Address Book preferences pane with the Google Sync settings but unfortunately that didn’t work out. I guess ill just have to settle with doing a little bit of hacking on you mac and let Plaxo do the rest.

I’m currently using Plaxo to keep all my contacts and what minimal use of calendar in sync with everything from my apple macbook to my windows live accounts, and partially my GMail account. The only problem that I have had is keeping my Gmail contacts in sync with my Plaxo account, because it currently supports a uni-directional sync. Meaning that it can only pick up changes on my Gmail contacts, but Plaxo cannot change or add contacts that I have edited from my Address Book.app or even just new people I’ve added to the MSN messenger. Today while browsing the world of Twitter I found some people retweeting about the new service by Google, Google Push. Which in some ways it competes with Plaxo, and Mobile Me services. It keeps your iPhone or other mobile devices synchronized with the various google services. The only downfall of it would be that when you set it up you lose all the contacts that you currently already have stored on your phone and it adds the gmail contacts to it instead.

What can probably be done in order to complete this whole Sync circle of services that I have going is possibly set up Google Sync on my iPhone, then once all my contacts have been cleared is sync my iPhone with my Mac’s Address Book.app and if all goes well I will have my Plaxo contacts in Sync with my iPhone and from my iPhone have my Gmail contacts Synchronized as well and therefore closing that circle that Plaxo can’t do because Gmail Contacts are only Uni-Directional Sync with Plaxo. Holy smokes that was a mouthful. In any case, I have not yet tried this connecting this chain of services yet and will keep posted on it.

Google Mobile Sync

NOTE: Please read on to my next post as some things didn’t work out with the uses on this post.