Welcome Back!

After many months in the dark, I have recovered the last of the pieces from my old Mac Mini G4, so that all of my services — DNS, Open Directory, Email (Postfix, Cyrus, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, MailMan), MySQL, and Drupal with updated PHP, since Apple’s default PHP install doesn’t include any of the necessary modules.

First my external drive for TimeMachine backups died… I replaced it with a new drive, but it had to complete a new, full backup. During the full backup, the external drive that the server was running from died from old age… After several partially successful attempts to recover the data using DiskWarrior, I tried to reconstruct the old Mini, but wasn’t able to get it to boot up… I thought that I had recovered enough of the data that I could use it to migrate to the new server, but the server migration wizard would die partway through.

After manually rebuilding Mail under 10.7 with Server 1.0, I found that when I updated to 10.8 and Server 2.0 that the migration wizard couldn’t even move my data and configuration from 10.7… So I had to manually rebuild DNS and Mail once again…

I have since migrated from an old 32-bit G4 Mini, to a newer 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo, with 8Gb of RAM. I’ve gone from OS X Server 10.5.8 to 10.7 and on to 10.8.2 Mountain Lion, with Server 2.2.1. I’ve had to manually install MailMan, since that is no longer included with Server. I also had to manually install MySQL, since Apple dropped it in lieu of Postgresql. I had to reinstall phpMyAdmin, only to find that Apple’s installation of PHP 5 doesn’t include many of the common modules needed. I used to use Entropy PHP, but its not being supported any longer. Its been superseded by php-osx from LIIP, also in Switzerland. Then I discovered that the Server app insists on reverting back to the default PHP every time it restarts… I had to reinstall Drupal 6.20, and then updated to 6.28. Then I had to update and fix some modules, reinstall MacPorts to load ImageMagick, etc…

But now I’m back online! I still have some formatting issues to work out, as my Zen theme and stylesheets seemed to have gotten a little broken, so bear with me while I do some more fine-tuning…

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