Jump to content

Anyone running a Mac Mini server?


Recommended Posts

So our G5 server is giving us hell and I've either got to reinstall or we need to upgrade to new hardware and Snow Leopard Server.

Tight belts and all means we're actually considering a Mac Mini. Has anyone had any experience with the latest ones?

We're down to 5 workstations (4 local, 1 remote) plus a couple of admin machines. We'd be running all standard services (file server, calendar, ichat, mail, wiki, address book and vpn). We currently use 400 GB of space.

Is a Mac Mini going to be man enough?

Link to comment

We don't run a lot of in house file serving, but I have been running MacMini Intel with Leopard Server for about 2 years and it has been fine. We run about 10 mail accounts and web sites and it has never been a problem.

For about the last 5 years I have been running a G4 Mac Mini as a server running Panther with Apache and Postfix turned on. It easily handles 500+ emails a day for about 20 accounts and hosts the PodCAD.tv and Vectortasks.com web sites.

If you are concerned, google mac mini colocation and look at all of the large hosting companies that are running Mac Minis.

I think you will be fine with a Mini. If it is not enough as you expand then you can move to a larger machine.

With 400GB of data I would recommend that you boot and run off of an external drive. That is what I did when I outgrew the internal drive. I also keep a second external drive (different brand) mirrored so I can quickly do a swap if there is a problem.

Link to comment

We have one running in an office of 10 users.

It's a pretty basic setup:

It runs retrospect to backup files (over the network) to an external USB disk.

It shares a folder containing our admin files and archived projects.

My observation is this:

OSX Server is not as easy to setup as a regular copy of OSX.

The mac mini itself is very limited in hard disk space, which wouldn't be a problem if it had e-sata, but it doesn't, so it is.

Basically, I tried sharing a firewire connected disk - but it was geologically slow: 5GB transfer to the server would take over an hour. I switched to USB, but same problem. Now I only use the internal disks.

If you can get by with less than 1TB total disk space - split over two disks, then it's fine.

Turning on services other than file sharing slows things down quite noticeably.

Link to comment

I think it'd be fine for everything but the file serving, although it might surprise you there and be fine, I'd say it'd largely depend on how much everyone is requesting files and how big they are.

Are you at all concerned about redundancy of drives? Setting up RAID for higher availability?

Link to comment

I've got the current model mac mini server - the one with the built in power supply that looks like the Apple TV unit. We bought it because it was much better value than the sever software alone. We only needed the server software because apple cripple the standard OS to prevent more than 10 users being able to connect to the one computer.

We would have just got a NAS box, but my previous experience with the READYNAS was that it was too slow for users with large files.

If you have less than 10 connections to the computer, then plain vanilla OSX is just as good.

It's an unfortunate problem with the mac line up that the macs without built in monitors are pretty expensive for what you get and the other hardware isn't designed for any disk redundancy or ability to be upgraded.

I also found that most of the services offered on OSX server can actually be achieved better just by getting a decent Router with VPN.

However, it's all we need at the moment, looks very nice and is totally quiet.

Link to comment

Thanks for the advice everyone. In the end we had the following choices, if anyone is curious:

  • Mac Mini Server = ?1300 (with Applecare, RAM upgrades, etc.), not guaranteed to do what we need it to do.
  • Share Xserve with company we already share office with = ?1100 (to upgrade hard drives, RAM and OS)
  • Reinstall Leopard Server (and hope the errors aren't hardware related) = ?0

Last night I went with the 3rd option. I think I managed to sort out a longstanding problem with DNS too (which may have triggered the problem in the first place) by handing DNS off to our Airport Extreme router.

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...