This morning version 4.5 of the excellent owncloud package was released. This is excellent competition to all those Apples and Googles who fight to take control of your personal data. Finally there is a decent solution to host all of this yourself.

Calendar, as well as sharing it works flawless without problems. For addressbooks, there seems to be a flaw in Mac OSX, which prevents the addressbook app to see more than one of them. It just picks the first it sees. If someone shares an addressbook with you, it can even cover up your own contacts. This is quite annoying and I recommend not using this feature for now. Hopefully a workaround is found soon.

Rest should work fine. You can install all settings via profiles as usually. Old installations will continue to work as well. In case you experience any problems, just reinstall your configuration profile and let it sync again.

Webmail was updated to version 0.7 with a new skin. I also removed the last bits of MySQL-dependence of the email-system. This has the benefit that everything is simpler to administer and more stable.

Apple’s latest operating system for mobile devices has been out for a few weeks now. The upgrade was mostly an evolutionary one and didn’t add too many new features. One thing apple has done tough was to tighten their grip on devices after they have been sold, by tighter integrating them into their iCloud service. If customers should wish, they can now upload their pictures, calendar, address book, bookmarks, notes, documents or location to Apple’s servers. Since the firm’s own data center in North Carolina isn’t finished yet, extra capacity was rented from Microsoft and Amazon. This is problematic, because now we don’t even know which company is handling our data.

This is one reason why I want to remind people that almost all of iCloud’s functionality can be realized by using a simple Unix-server as well. This includes email and notes by simply using IMAP. Contacts, calendars and reminders are based on CalDAV and CardDAV. For bookmarks, documents and photos one could use WebDAV.

When using the open version of iCloud, you don’t only keep your data under control, but can also use them from non-Apple Android, Windows and Linux systems.

Hosted calendar and contacts service is now available for all users of email. It’s base on Card/CalDAV and should work out-of-the-box with all newer Apple devices, as well as most open source clients. For Android there are apps available.

In the early days of my server-career, I had to use lighttpd for RAM-reasons. Over time the limitations of lighttpd were mounting. E.g. no .htaccess-files, no auth with certificates, bad DAViCal integration, inconsistent LDAP-filters. Moreover after some time lighttpd uses up more and more memory.

So for now I’m just using both of them to compare performance and overall ease-of-user.

It is happening. Conventional IPs will run out in less than 2 months from now. After that we might get by another year, by using the IPs we have more efficiently. Still the only long-term solution is to switch to the new IP-protocol version 6.

I’m proud to announce that since today the snapdragon-servers are fully IPv6-ready. That means webserver, mailserver and IMAP. You shouldn’t notice any change, since IPv4 is still on as well.

If you would like to see whether you’re viewing an v4 or v6-address, you could install this Firefox-plugin or start Chrome with the option –prefer-family=IPv6 or simply browse to the IPv6-version of Google.

If you’re not sure how to configure the Email Client of your choice, see here.

Officially recommended clients: Apple Mail, Outlook 2010, Thunderbird