Thinking about giving up...

Question

I have many years of experience doing UNIX/Linux (and way back Mac) admin work but Leopard Server has me wanting to quit altogether. It started, as these types of things often do, with the seductive promise of an all in one server with georgous black glossy blurbs.
Our small company was thinking about Exchange and the whole windows server setup, but after pricing the CALs and the machines it was put on hold. I decided to risk buying a mac mini and 10-user Leopard Server with my own $ since the boss didn't think it would work. I was excited to have an integrated package rather than building individual open source services, after 3 weeks I am no longer excited.
Here is what I wanted:
* OD Master acting as PDC for windows users. (No Legacy 10.4 stuff and no AD stuff - should be easy)
* Self Signed Certs (They are for internal servers for crying out loud, why do I have to pay for internal only server certs)
* DNS (didn't want it but you need the d*mn reverse entries for anything to work)
[the reverse zone editor doesn't work correctly, it had "example.com" still stuck in the arpa zone file, but it did not show up in the zone editor tab - this happened twice and is due it seems to the auto reverse zone creation functionality of the GUI editor]
* iCal
* Mail Services
* Wiki/Blogs
* SMB shares
* Have some system stuff running off an external RAID-1 firewire drive rather than the internal drive.
(I gave up on this after foolishly trying to use the "choose" buttons on some of the services thinking that I could just point (say mail or web or iCal) to a non-standard folder and it would do the permission and ownership tweaks necessary to make the chosen folders actually work for said services - ha!
Well, after 5 re-installs I read in the discussions here that iCal doesn't work with Kerberos
OD doesn't work with self signed certs, nor does the rest of the system seem to either - I saw the discussion where some people got it working. The thing that gets me is you have a certificate assistant GUI and cert management "tab" on the Server Admin yet neither of them can do what needs to be done to make a self signed cert work with the Leopard Server components. Why bother having those tools? Torture is the only reason I can think of.
When I turn off SSL and set everything to cleartext auth it seems to almost kinda work...
Sorry for the rant, there is more but it is another 7:45 AM morning at the end of a reinstall night.
Does anyone know how to get iCal and/or wikis working with Kerberos?
Does anyone know why the system arbitrarily picks an IP address to associate with the main "bolded" entry in the ServerAdmin->Settings->Network tab? I wanted my ns and mx to be on a separate IPs from the rest of the services but the server decided that the mx IP would be the "bold" IP not the one that is associated with the main network interface so now all my kerberos principals read [email protected], not [email protected].

Answer 1

First, be aware that you probably do not have unlimited data on your phone.  In addition, using your phone as a data modem for your computer requires a seperate data account. 
As far as using the coffe shop's open wi-fi...are you completely unaware of the security implications of using it?  It is an open hot spot, and you are prone to spoofing, man-in-the middle, DOS and other attacks.
If I were you, I would bundle comcast cable and internet...go for the highest speed package you can afford, and make sure that you are indeed getting unlimited data.  When at home, you can use both yrou phone and your computer on your wireless network. 
Your smartphone, even with a dock, will never replace a computer.  You need more storage than is available on your phone. 
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