The constant rolling of technology continues at our home. Its been relatively uneventful so I haven’t posted every detail. In fact, I’ve forgotten (and am too lazy to look back) the last time I posted about a certain piece of hardware or software. So in this post I’ll just skip over the history and jump to right where things are at today.
We are using iPhone 6s and 6s+ currently along with iPad Air 2 and Pro 9.7. Late 2012 MacBook Pro, late 2014 Mac Mini, and mid 2012 Mac Pro. All running the latest iOS and macOS Sierra. Nothing particularly eventful, just the normal minor struggles with less than stellar software. It is what it is and there is really nothing better out there.
I still have the 2009 Mac Pro (flashed to 2010). The power supply has been going for a year or more. Doesn’t reliably come out of sleep but can always be coaxed into turning on. In order to sell it I would have to replace (or repair) the power supply which, at this point, would cost half of what I could sell it for.
I got rid of the SuperMicro servers last fall and replaced with a pair of used Dell R710 II. I have a love/hate relationship with x86/x64 things but these are pretty good. Definitely better than the SuperMicro crap. For being such a commodity product these days, there really isn’t a whole lot of choice – either Dell or HP. The server is running Solaris 11.3 and a similar mix of services as before.
Our ISP finally dropped the ax and we could no longer host a SMTP server in our home. I’m now using a small virtual server at cloudsigma.com running FreeBSD for email. Using namecheap.com for domain registrar (like it better than Godaddy). All in all pretty good setup and I will be moving our cloud backups to it eventually. Yes, running a public email server can be a security nightmare. I’ve configured ours to only receive email from our known forwarders for our domains. You may wonder why I don’t just rely on Google or Apple to host our email. I steer clear of Google as much as possible as I don’t like being monetized.
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