This post will sound somewhat similar to my post last week about the Tiger upgrade, although hopefully it won’t be followed by another ‘Back to Panther‘ post!

After removing all traces of Norton Internet Security for Mac 3.0 and Missing Sync, I had installed and got ClamXAV running, and as I mentioned earlier in the week, removed the need for a local mail server.

The upgrade proved to be a lot quicker than last week, particularly the backup of the existing installation. SuperDuper, the excellent bit of backup software I’ve been using has a really useful smart backup mode that took my previous backup from last week, worked out what had changed, and only copied those files. Incidentally, if you haven’t got a backup application for your Mac, I can highly recommend SuperDuper. It is carefully designed to be as easy to use as possible, plus will explain everything it is going to do as clearly as possible. Aside from that it has a number of features designed to smooth the process of carrying out upgrades such as the Tiger upgrade. To be honest I wouldn’t have been up and running as fast as I was last week without it!

Anyway, back to the upgrade. As last week I did a clean install, and also made use of the migration wizard. With Norton and Missing Sync gone, there wasn’t the hassles and error messages I was getting last week. ClamXAV coped fine, and as with most other apps, spotted the change and sorted itself out, remembering all my settings. Mail also transferred without problems. The only thing remaining to do is to install the upgraded version of Missing Sync and then I’m done.

After the failure to get the Tiger upgrade to work yesterday, I’ve been looking at sorting out the issues that caused the upgrade problems.

Firstly, the local mail server gave me a lot of hassles, although that proved to be pretty easy to solve thanks to Howard. At this point it is worth looking back at why I was running a mail server anyway.

For many years my main ISP was Demon, who have always allowed infinite multiple mailboxes on a single account. Until Beth and I got married, I hadn’t needed the feature, however after Beth managed to download a virus from her web based e-mail, whilst all the incoming mail from Demon was virus checked I decided that it would probably be better if we found a way to allow Beth to have an address on the Demon account. Without getting overly technical, Demon cheats a bit to provide the infinite multiple mailboxes, whilst still providing POP3 support, effectively dumping all the e-mail together into one account, and then relying on the user to split it. They do provide ways to do the split, but it is a hassle to set up and either provides one user to get everything, or individual users, no intermediate stage with single users and a catch all address to sweep up the rest. Therefore the most straightforward way to deal with it is just to dump all the Demon e-mail into a local mail server, and use that. Since the Mac includes a built in mail server, that seemed the easiest option.

Things remained like that until Arborfield exchange got broadband, when thanks to their increasing ineptitude, and generally poor product offering, ultimately Zen got my business for my broadband connection. The main negative with Zen was limited e-mail, so at that point I registered a domain name, and hosted this up with gradwell.com. At this point I only had their basic E-Mail Forwarding account that only rewrote the addresses on e-mails, but still needed my local e-mail server to do the sorting behind. Although I’ve subsequently upgraded the gradwell package, I’ve still stuck with the same basic e-mail setup.

Talking over the e-mail issue with Howard, he pointed out that my current gradwell package provided e-mail hosting, and with their superb management system I could easily match the setup I had locally, without needing any local server. One of those occasions where since other circumstances have changed, a different solution is now a lot more straightforward. As a result, I now have a similar e-mail setup configured through the gradwell servers to what I had before, however it should upgrade with a lot less hassle to Tiger, and won’t need any fudges to work either.

The next issue to be addressed, that of Norton Internet Security Mac, was looking like running without a virus checker for a while, as currently only Norton Antivirus had been fixed (for a £26.99 upgrade fee), but a fixed Norton Internet Security was coming, but again that would be a paid for upgrade. However the MacDevCenter.com newsletter turned up this morning, complete with an article about an open source virus checker for the Mac called ClamXav. To be frank, the underlying anti-virus software ClamAV is actually responding as quick, if not quicker to new threats than the majors, pretty ironic for open source, and certainly quicker than the update frequency of the Mac version of Norton! Quite apart from that, it works on Tiger for free (although I’ll probably give the developer a donation), whilst I’ll need to pay to get a working version of Norton.

In fact the only outstanding issue is updating Missing Sync – roll on Tiger!

As I wrote back in May, although I purchased a copy of MacOS 10.4 Tiger, I wasn’t going to upgrade as MissingSync , the software I use to keep my PDA in line hadn’t been updated.

Anyway, I recieved notification this week that the new version was finally available, however since I won’t get a clear weekend to do what is needed with my MacOS install for a couple of weeks, I thought I’d use the opportunity to keep an eye on the MissingSync mailing list to see how the early adopters cope. To date, although some have had no problems, others on the list are not happy, and especially with having to pay for another problematic version.

I think that maybe I’ll wait until I have a chance to install Tiger, and do the changeover then – maybe the problems will be fixed!

Thanks to the PCC Away Day at the weekend, although my copy of MacOS 10.4 Tiger turned up last week, I haven’t actually installed it.

I’d already decided that it could probably do with a proper clear down and rebuild. Previously I have always done an upgrade, so the results of a couple of years worth of fiddling and trying things out have probably taken their toll on performance. As I really need a clear weekend to get the basics back up and running, I hadn’t really got started.

However, having had a browse through the forums, and looked at various blog postings about the new operating system, I suspect I’ll be on 10.3 for a while longer, the chief reason being MissingSync.

MissingSync is the software that I use to keep my PDA in sync with the address book and calendar on the Mac. The way it does this is through a Mac application called iSync which has been extensively rewritten for Tiger, making it incompatible with the existing version of MissingSync. An update is currently due to arrive in June, however what makes it more annoying is that MarkSpace are pulling the old “we’re not updating the existing version, please buy our new version with more features” routine. Of course I don’t need the new features, so it is generally a bit of pain. As I have issues with a couple of bugs with certain appointment types, I may use the opportunity to jump ship to the opposition, and buy a copy of PocketMac instead.

Hopefully by the time the third-party software is all Tiger compatible, Apple will have ironed out some of the hiccups in the OS, chief among them being the new Mail application which seems to be causing some people a lot of frustration!