Some of the programs running on Jennifer, which is my server. It's a PowerMac 6100 running Mac OS 8.1 with 72 MB RAM and 1.2 GB hard drive. I've had the computer since April 1993 and I've been using it as a server for the last couple of years. It's slow but it does work well enough for light loads.

I have NetPresenz 4.1 running for the web and ftp server. It's a good basic server which also supports Gopher (I think I leave that off). The web server supports Applescript, Perl, and Frontier CGI programs. There's very little setup involved, NetPresenz uses Appleshare for its users and groups. I settled on NetPresenz rather than the free offerings from Apple or Microsoft because it supports changing the web ports, rather important when we were using one IP address and mapping ports to different machines.

For a POP/SMTP server I'm using Stalker Internet Mail Server. I was using EIMS (the free version) but I wanted to redirect mail from one domain to another and EIMS lite doesn't support that. SIMS does. It has a web interface which is faster than its native interface (an Appletalk client). Somewhat configurable, but not very. One thing that's annoying is that SIMS silently takes care of bad e-mails. It records them in the log file and a bad mail queue, but it doesn't notify the sender that he just sent a bad e-mail. That's annooying since then you never find out that a certain e-mail address is bad. EIMS Pro is easier to use (especially if you've used EIMS lite) and has a better interface, but it is $250 so for now I'll stick with SIMS.

I'm also running a VNC (Virtual Network Computer) server so I can remote control Jennifer. It's free and it works ok. You can't do file transfers, but it supports more client and server systems than Timbuktu or PCAnywhere. Timbuktu is a little faster and smoother though and VNC crashes under some color settings.

I just installed a web log analyzer called Analog. It creates a nice web page with all the stats. There are a lot of options (it's a ported Unix program) so there are a lot of things I kind of ignored. I have an Applescript that runs it every morning to update the stats (which filters out the local machine accesses). Quite a nifty (and free) program.

MacDNS is used for a DNS server. It's quite easy to set up, much easier than setting up a Unix DNS server. It can't be a secondary DNS server. As competition there's QuickDNS lite (I think) which is not a DNS server really, just a cache. QuickDNS Pro is quite nice, lots of features and such, but expensive for a DNS server for essentially two machines Jennifer and Angela, Dave uses his Unix server for his DNS needs). It's not fast for a DNS server, but fast enough for me.

I'm also running Microsoft Outlook Express. It's used to forward mail from a mailing list to another mailing list. This was something I tried to do with Eudora Pro but Eudora doesn't strip the bulk e-mail flag (which is probably the proper behavior) like Outlook does. Thank Goddess for bad Microsoft programming. This is something that could also be done with UNIX SMTP, but I do try to do these things on a Mac.