After multiple complaints from an irritating associate of mine, I am building a secure server for my various secure computing needs. The complaints have focused on the fact that I have a Gmail account. While I generally agree that allowing a company to host all of my personal email, where it can be indexed, queried, and sold to various individuals and companies around the world, is a bad idea, so far, the worst side effect has been all the Google ads for Dallas real estate. Like I think Kennedy’s really dead!

All the same, I’ve been thinking it would be fun to buy a rackmount server, install OpenBSD, apache, qmail, roundcube, and sshd. I’ll install my public key in sshd so my remote logins and file transfers would be encrypted. I’ll generate an SSL certificate to encrypt the roundcube exchanges. The machine will be colocated at the InterNAP datacenter in Somerville, if I get a reasonably good deal on rack space. Then I just have to guard against physical intrusions into the server and convince everyone who emails me to use GPG, and maybe I’ll finally drop back off the CIA’s radar.

Maybe an encrypted filesystem will be necessary as well. I realize that the US government could just subpoena the bejesus out of me, but at least then I’d know what they were getting. (In reality, this will never occur; I’m just preparing for the day when I actually have something useful to encrypt.)
Comments about the security holes I’m missing are welcome from those who are not the irritating associate.

You need another Mac with a DVD drive. I’ll call that the desktop, although it could be another iBook. Note that this is probably only worth doing if you’ve added 512 MB of RAM to your old iBook. Without extra RAM, Tiger runs painfully slowly.

1. Put the Tiger install DVD in the desktop. Restart it, and hold down the T key as it boots. Once you see a yellow firewire symbol on the screen, you can release the T key. You have just booted your desktop in what is called “target disk mode.”
2. Connect the two machines with a firewire cable.
3. Reboot the old iBook with the option key held down. This will allow you to choose the boot disk.
4. It will take a while for the Tiger DVD to appear– you’ll see the iBook and desktop hard drives right away; the Tiger DVD will take a minute to show up.
5. Select the Tiger DVD, and click the arrow icon to continue.
6. Install Tiger as you would normally on a machine with a DVD drive.