.mac emulation

Yesurbius

Yesurbius

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Does anybody know of a project that emulates the .mac protocol?

I mean - so you go into iDisk or iPhoto and do a .mac function, and it gets redirected to another server (ie. a OS X Server) ?

I was hoping that iLife'06 would make it more easier to manage my photo and movie collection which I have hosted on my own webspace. It appears as if Apple is cramming .mac down our throats even moreso now however. .mac doesn't offer PHP or SQL - nor can I get 5GB of disk space - so for me it is just not suitable .. but by tying all their apps to .mac they are alienating everyone else that .mac is not good for.

So I figured - why not run a .mac server on the local network?
 
You mean iDisk?

iDisk is WebDAV so all you need to do is find a host which supports WebDAV. I use it all the time for editing files on the server. Transmit is a great app for this, it supports ftp and WebDAV.

You can also log in directly from the finder to a WebDAV server for read/write access but it's much slower than Transmit.
 
I'm running Panther - so maybe they've changed iDisk in Tiger. I know you can go to Finder and go "Connect to Server..." and enter in a web address - I've set that up on my webspace as well.. But if I go into iDisk in Panther it says I can't use it because I don't have a .Mac membership.

As far as Transmit goes - I thought transmit would have been the answer to my prayers but its syncronization didn't work. Instead of looking at file name and file size, it looks at the filename and file date - which is stupid because the FTP server's date may be considerably off from yours - especially if their file times is not on GMT (ie. I live in +2 time zone, and my hosting server is in -8). So when I was trying to synchronize 3 GB of photos, I found that everytime I went to synchronize, transmit was reuploading them all. This resulted in Transmit -> Trash bin.

Lets say you have a school though. You have a few labs full of Macs, and you are running an Mac OS X server. Being only able to publish stuff to .Mac easily is kind of ridiculous. So is there a feature or a setting that can be changed to redirect .Mac functions to another server? Or is Apple locking everyone to .mac for the easy route, and if you want anything other than .mac you have to do it the hard way?
 
Yesurbius said:
Lets say you have a school though. You have a few labs full of Macs, and you are running an Mac OS X server. Being only able to publish stuff to .Mac easily is kind of ridiculous. So is there a feature or a setting that can be changed to redirect .Mac functions to another server? Or is Apple locking everyone to .mac for the easy route, and if you want anything other than .mac you have to do it the hard way?
Click to expand...

Same deal - WebDAV. There's nothing proprietary about the method Apple uses to connect to iDisk. You can set up any server to use WebDAV.

Google it.

Here: http://webdav.org/
 
I understand what webdav is. iDisk, iPhoto, they all use .mac (even if .mac utilizes webdav) to publish info to the net. But what if I don't want it to go to Apple's .mac service and I would rather have it hosted on my own? Apple doesn't have that facility to do so?

Example. If you go into iDisk without a .mac membership it won't let you go in there. Likewise, if I go into iPhoto, click on Share, then homepage - it also won't let me go in there. But if I enter in .mac information in System Preferences - then all of the above work - but to the Apple's .mac servers.

Its hard coded. If Apple had the .mac service available as webspace, email, backups - etc as a turnkey solution for those that want those things but are not very technical - then great. But if .mac utilizes a standard protocol such as webdav, then why not give users the ability to specify an alternate webdav server and have all .mac publishing functions publish there?

I may be on to something. I was looking through plists and I find that in com.apple.internetpref.plist it makes reference to a web plist:

http://configuration.apple.com/conf...diskconfiguration/1/clientConfiguration.plist

If I pull up that web address I see mac.com configuration values. I also notice WebObjects. Perhaps with a Mac OS X server, running WebObjects, you can override each workstation's plist files, and accomplish the .Mac sync as I describe to the local Mac OS X Server...

Hmm.. will keep digging.
 
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