While using 3.x on my iPhone free (as in self-hosted and "free as in free speech") syncing was a bit of tinkering here and there but worked. With iOS 4 Apple introduced a new scheme for the Calendar (which used to be a nicely and sanely formatted sqlite file), so all the sync-tools aren't really working anymore. Iphonesync (required J/B Phones and synced to e.g. Funambol) can still read notes(?) and addresses but can't sync the calendar anymore. So i was looking for another option to sync this thingy - and found one (or two) ...

Basically there are two options - one is to use libimobiledevice, a library that achieved protocol-compatability with iPhones native interfaces (the same protocol as used by iTunes) that is just Wowzers. They also implemented a API for syncing calendar, contacts, notes and apps(?). Problem is - the API is there, but no "client" to use it. Conduit seems to have something in the planning or may have even started implementing it... but you'd have to hack or wait here.

The other option you have is checking what option that strange phone has natively, and for iOS 4.x you may discover theres calDAV and cardDAV, which are two nice (almost) standardized protocols for syncinc Calendars and Contacts... So why not just use them?

Turns out it's a bit more complicated than that. Apple has published a card/calDAV sync-server under GPL, but has made it kind of complicated to get this up and running nicely. Thanks to the thrive of the Free Software Scene there are quite some alternatives, to me to most noteworthy one is davical - a nice little service written in php to provide both cardDAV and calDAV as well as a tiny tweeny little web-interface for administration and settings. That and a variety of sync-clients on the Linux side makes just what you need! So let's set this up!

For those of you using Debian there's the nice way to use the official davical packages on their repository. I chose another path and installed from git - i simply checked out their git-repos and moved the files in my DocumentRoot, then almost verbatimly followed theiwiki-page for Debian-Installations. One real problem was the .well-known URL scheme for cardDAV (who the f... came up with that f... up scheme for auto-discovery?). Thanks to the nice support in the davical irc channel and some brute-forcing i got it to work quite easily. Luckily i didn't need the SRV-Records proposed here (why ever?!), so all i had to do is forwarding the .well-known urls correctly:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^/.well-known(.*)$ /caldav.php/.well-known$1 [NC,L]

RewriteRule ^/principals/users(.*)$ /caldav.php$1 [NC,L]

caldav://your.hostna.me/path/to/caldav.php/USERNAME/home

http://your.hostna.me/path/to/caldav.php/USERNAME/YOUR-CONTACTS-NAME

Z-Push is a collection of PHP Scripts that emulate a Microsoft Exchange AS Server to provide push. It supports multiple backends - IMAP among them.

One drawback of Z-Push is that it does so strange PHP magic it doesn't support PHP-CGI on apache, it wants mod_php really really bad. But mod_php is bad for security. So for testing purposes i've set up Z-Push on my homeserver instead of my dedicated server which runs php-cgi. Problem: Z-Push will run on a different domain and machine than the mailserver runs on. This produces quite some headache - here's how you solve it:

1. normally install Z-Push (simply unpack the tarball and install according to INSTALL) on your "small server". Edit config.php to reflect your timezone settings, change the BACKEND_PROVIDER to "BackendIMAP", enter your server data (you may want /ssl/[no]validate-cert in IMAP_OPTIONS). Also set IMAP_DEFAULTFROM to "@yourdomain.com" - important .
2. Configure your "small servers" MTA to relay via your "big server". As i don't want a pseudo-open relay on my "big server" i chose to use exims SMARTHOST with SMTP Login method:
3. (I'm assuming Debian here) install exim4 or start dpkg-reconfigure exim4-config. Configure your box to be a smarthost with remote smtp. Then open up "/etc/exim4/passwd.client" and add a line with the syntax "host:user:password" to reflect your "big servers" smtp account.
4. As this is a normal smtp connection and no relay, no changes must be made to your big server.
5. Thats it, enter the data as Microsoft Exchange Account on your iPhone, valdidation will fail. Press Next and Save anyways, navigate to Account Details, turn of SSL.
6. Now your Push-Email account works!

Tipp: if you need debug output from Z-Push create a file called debug.txt in its Install-Dir and chmod it a+rw.

Well, this is IMO a quite nice way to get PushMail as a SMS-Substitute for the iPhone (given all your friends have Smartphones with Internet and use your Push solution too ). Have fun!

So, after a *ton* of googeling and looking around i found out theres a app for jailbroken iPhones which reads the .sqlitedb files of Contacts, Calendar and Notes and sends it to a specialized synchronization server for PIM. Luckily theres a bunch of clients for other platforms - including S60, evolution, ldap, etc. - we're interested in the Evolution one.

So, i installed Funambol (the syncserver) on my server and started it up. First to notice is that the startup often does not work at first try - i had to start/stop the server a few times before it would serve me on http://hostname:8080/funambol/. Also there seems to be a fucked-up state where the http-server is running but the admin-interface won't let you log in. At that point i also had to restart the server a few times *sigh*.
Then i installed iPhoneSync, the iPhone funambol client on my handset, started it up, entered my servers data and synced. Woosh, failed. The Log said "server returned error -1" ... wowziez, cool - whats that? No table of error codes, no description, no server debug log entries, nothing - not even a bugreport in some mailinglist. Basically its a funambol bug concerning contact-Thumbnails with more than 8k size *Sigh*. At least its fixed in svn trunk...

Now comes the fun part - compiling Funambol. As Funambol needs tomcat, netbeans, maven2 and a whole other bunch of dependencies its *really* fun. With some tinkering i made it to a installer package - that now even works with the iPhone.
So, for all of you out there running into the same bug as me - heres a Funambol binary of svn trunk with this bug fixed:

http://tmp.kanojo.de/funambol-8.2.2-SNAPSHOT.bin

So - here's what you basically need to do:

1. scp the above binary on your server, ssh there and execute "sh funambol-8.2.2-SNAPSHOT.bin"
2. install the server as guided by the installation program, i installed it to /opt. Also note it *really* only installs stuff there, so no worries about trash not managed by the package management on your system .
3. when asked whether you want to start the server say no
4. cd to /<wherever>/Funambol/, execute "./bin/funambol-server start", wait a few minutes (you can also check top whether java has stopped eating up your whole cpu-power)
5. start up the admin interface, either on the server by using remote X (ssh -X) "./admin/bin/funamboladmin" or in a installation of funambol on your current desktop box.
6. there, log in using "admin" as user and "sa" as password, go to user management, change the admin pw (important! ) and log in again.
7. once again in user management create a new user for you.
8. on your jailbroken iPhone with cydia, install "iphonesync" via cydia, start it up, enter your servers data (http://yourhostname:8080/funambol/ds) - and sync!
9. on your desktop box, install syncevolution, to configure do the following:
10. execute "syncevolution --configure --sync-property "username=123456" --sync-property "password=!@#ABcd1234" funambol". then open up ~/.config/syncevolution/funambol/config.ini and change the URI to the same as you used on your iPhone
11. sync using syncevolution -s <mode> funambol (<mode> can be one of the items seen in "syncevolution -s ?")

Happy Syncing!