I’m working on an app for tracking meals at work, so I’m setting up a couple Mac minis as servers.

The first time I worked on this app, I used MAMP to help with development. It was very handy and made a complex task much easier for me.

But, I always felt like I was taking the easy way out. That by skipping the server setup, I was missing some knowledge that would be useful, elsewhere.

So, now that we’re slowly returning to work, I have been charged with getting the Meal Tracker back up and running.

This time, I have a couple Mac minis (one at home and one at work). I’ll be setting them up with MySQL and PHP and Apache. And, I’ll be setting them up “properly.”

I found these pages useful:

Install Apache, PHP, MySQL and phpMyAdmin on Mac OS X

Updating Apache, PHP, and MySQL for macOS Catalina

I was thinking that something that has changed, since the last time I worked on this, is that I’m much more comfortable working in the Terminal and working on servers, in general. This time, I am using Homebrew to help manage installations.

But, now, I’m wondering about whether I should be using Docker…

This week has been very busy on our network. With a staff of approximately 100, plus around 80 students, and about 100 other networked devices, our network is busy.

In fact, we’re exploring ways to increase bandwidth, which is amazing, because this current setup was supposed to be enough to handle the organization for another year.

Since I started, about 4 months ago, spam has not been much of a problem. But the past few weeks, we have been getting more and more.

As soon as we get some spam, we track down the IP and add it to our firewall. We do some research to see where it’s coming from.

Last week, most of our spam was from Russia. This week, we’ve been receiving spam from Mexico, Brazil and Japan.

Most are innocuous “male performance” enhancements, but we have had a handful of messages with Trojan Horse attachments.

They appear as a fake message from DHL. The subject line indicates a problem with delivery of a package. This is apparently the Bredolab virus.

This snippet comes from a Symantec security blog by Daren Lewis, “It comes from the Cutwail (aka. Pandex) botnet, which is one of the largest mass mailing botnets in existence, with over one million ‘zombie’ machines under its control.”

Spammers are scum.