Nerd Vittles » HOW-TO Extravaganza: Spring Break Projects for You & Your Mac mini. Well, it’s that time of the year again. The Nerd Vittles staff will be taking a breather for a bit to recharge our batteries. But, in the finest college tradition, we’re leaving you lots of homework. Here’s a listing of what we’ve built thus far in our Mac mini ISP-In-A-Box project. So, while we’re taking it easy, pick out a few projects you haven’t tried and knock yourself out. Any Mac running at least Mac OS X v10.3 aka Panther is a suitable candidate for these projects. Many also have been tested with Tiger. Visit Tiger Vittles for the Tiger update notes to many of these tutorials. Apache Web ServerEmail Servers: SMTP, POP3, and IMAPMySQL Database ServerPHP and PhpMyAdminWebMinThe WebalizerWeb CalendarsEmail RemindersCrontab and CronniXWordPress 1.5 BlogTrixBox/Asterisk® VoIP PBX And here are some of our other tutorials to keep you and your Mac mini busy: Last but not least, for PC users thinking about making the Switch to a Mac, read our article and this one.
Who Is This Guy? Macos-x-server Info Page. Nerd Vittles. Well, our plan for today was to get down in the weeds of BSD and actually show you how to wrestle with crontabs to schedule tasks on your Mac or Mac mini. But, as luck would have it, our friends at iMagicWeb had a better solution that they wrote us about. So let’s shift gears and wrestle with crontab in the least painless way possible … which is to use a terrific piece of free software called CronniX. It was written specifically to manage cron jobs using the traditional Mac OS X Aqua interface.
Before we get to CronniX, let’s briefly address what crontab is and what it does for you. Think of crontab as the ultimate scheduler. There are three main things you do with cron jobs: you create them, you change them, and you delete them. Up to now we’ve been setting up cron jobs using Webmin which is every bit as efficient as swatting a fly with a sledge hammer. When you start up CronniX, it will default to the crontab for your current login ID. Nerd Vittles » ISP-In-A-Box: The $500 Mac mini (Chapter XIV: Remote Access and Remote Control) Today we’re going to tackle all the flavors of Remote Access for your Mac. It’s a must-have resource for Road Warriors and anyone using their Mac as a server of almost any kind. There are dozens of great remote access tools available but, in the interest of not putting everyone to sleep at once, we’ll focus on some of the built-in (i.e. free) tools, the best of the open source tools (i.e. free), and a couple of the more popular commercial products.
The prerequisites for all of these tools are having an always-on Internet connection and having an always-on Mac. And sleep mode doesn’t qualify as ON insofar as remote access is concerned. There are two types of remote access tools in my book: safe and dangerous. If you’ve been following our advice, then there is a hardware-based firewall of some variety between your Mac server and the Internet.
Secure FTP works similarly. There’s another type of Remote Access program. Be Sociable, Share!