I have a server at home that handles a variety of tasks, such as DNS hosting/caching, media serving, home automation, printer/scanner sharing, and security camera control. I’ve been running everything on an old P3-733 Linux Box [spockpowerusage, spockserverspecs] for over 8 years. This summer, in the interest of making a major upgrade as well as preparing for an eventual hardware failure, I decided to upgrade the hardware. Instead of building a new Linux box, I replaced the server with a Mac mini ![[B001U0OFKU]](http://www.mikeyp.com/css/external.gif)
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The Mac mini is incredibly powerful, small, quiet, and energy efficient. Check out the size difference between the mini and my old Linux server. These pictures barely do justice to the monstrous size of the Linux rack.
I bought the “low end” Mac mini and replaced the hard drive and added more RAM. The process was simple. There’s even a handy video on YouTube that illustrates each step.
Thanks to macports.org and Apple’s inclusion of the GNU tools, getting my server daemons up and running on the Mac was only a minor pain. I also installed the latest version of VMWare Fusion , where I’m running a Linux server on the Mac in a virtual machine. The mini is a great host for VMs. In retrospect, I wish I had set up the Linux VM first and kept my server daemons on Linux instead of going through the hassle of getting them to run native, but in the end, I like the resulting flexibility.
Some tips:
. It’s the only one that really works. Believe me, I tried a bunch of them. It’s hard to imagine a better piece of hardware for a home server than a Mac mini.
