I finally got around to going through the motions of setting up a personal .Mac server. Why? Mainly to use Apple’s Backup software. You can download the software fine, but you can’t actually use it unless you have paid for a .Mac account.

There are a couple of good pages on the subject of setting one of these up: How I created my own .mac replacement and Running Apple’s Backup Without a .Mac Account. Yes, they both sound promising, but I still couldn’t get the damn thing to totally work.

There are two major sections or steps to do here:
1/2. Get your clients to think that www.mac.com and idisk.mac.com are your server and not Apple’s.
1. Set up the network drive (based on web_dav) so that you can drag items over the web to your (fake) iDisk.
2. Have your server echo back to your clients the right messages so that it will unlock backup’s functionality.

The first mini-step was easy: simply editing the /etc/hosts file on my laptop. Done. I set up the iDisk just fine too. Web_dav is cool stuff and I got it going without have to rebuild apache more that 3 times! For the last scripts I wrote up the two scripts needed and had them echo back what the sites said backup wanted to hear. You think I’d be kicking back, using my personal .mac server, but no! It won’t work.

Here’s my theory on why I seemingly wasted my time: Tiger. Both of those sites are a bit out dated, the most recent update noted being January 2005, so my only idea is that Tiger’s .mac connections are new and they close up this hack’s ability to work. If thats not the case I’m not sure what I did wrong.

To make matters worse, there are no new sites, or discussions going on about this. I’ve sent out some emails but I’m not sure I’ll get anything back.