notMac challenge – free .Mac alternative

For those wishing to have a cheap alternative to Apple’s .Mac service the wait might be over. The “notMac Challenge” that has been going for a while and seems to be nearing the end with Ben Spink submitting a notMac application that seems to have quite a full feature set to challenge Apple’s .Mac and is based on a “lite” version of a commercial program CrushFTP.

All you have to do, according to its creator, is to get “a G4 machine, 400mhz or better can function as the server…but it will be SLOW at responding to some requests. So don’t expect it to be snappy. It should be functional though. You will want at least 128MB free RAM.”

The same install package holds files for a “server” and a “client” version and the application itself does very little changes to OS X: it writes 3 new lines in the /etc/hosts file, a startup item that goes to /System/Library/StartupItems/NotMac/, a customised .Mac Control panel and modifies X509 anchors keychain to trust new certificates.

The distribution file also have 2 AppleScript files that perform uninstall and upgrade.

The only point where it disappoints is the inability to use it with other WebDav implementations, at least for syncing, so hopefully as the program matures, that will be possible.