Entertained by the mini thing

I acquired a Mac mini as soon as I could get one in the local Apple Store. Even though I upgraded my first-generation white iBook to a 15" PowerBook last year for everything I do, the mini's price point was just too attractive to pass up. It was a great opportunity to upgrade my dependence on out-of-date machines. I decided my time was worth more than the price of a Mac mini.

The machine is small and quiet and looks nice so it is now part of my entertainment center instead of hiding in the basement like servers often do. I placed it amongst my audio and video gear because it will become an integral part of my multimedia environment. It runs perfectly well headless and takes up less space than a cable set top box.

I've been using an old PowerMac 7500 running linux as a server at home, and have a Beige G3 that I was planning to get Mac OS X running on as a replacement. The downside to the Beige G3 is that it doesn't have built-in USB so it is not a machine supported by Panther (Mac OS X 10.3). Not wanting to be stuck with Jaguar (Mac OS X 10.2) and not having much luck with XPostFacto, the Mac mini seemed like a must-have replacement.

I really wanted to get the hell away from linux and use Mac OS X for everything. Linux has become too time-consuming to administer, and I really don't like doing system administration. Linux runs well enough, but I think the upgrade cycle is painful and unproductive on it. With Mac OS X you run softwareupdate from the shell (or use Software Update from the GUI) to get the latest patches for Mac OS X. No RPMs, no rebuilding kernels, no having configurations break with every upgrade. Since this was going to be a server, I wiped the Mac mini and put Panther Server on it. This lets me take advantage of the remote server tools for administering the machine and have file shares active without having a user logged in.

With the mini up and running as my internal DNS server and CVS repository it completely replaced my linux box. Because of the simplicity of Mac OS X, I used the server admin tools to enable file sharing and I already have more functionality than I did with the linux box. No messing around with something like Samba of NFS necessary, I just used the nice GUI-based configuration window to enable AFP. If I need the other protocols, Mac OS X Server has those services as well. I just need to spend a minute configuring them and then turning them on.

To do the kinds of things I want to do with the mini that involve iPhoto and iTunes, I realized that I can't exactly run headless. While Apple Remote Desktop would address this issue, it costs almost as much as the Mac mini itself and just didn't seem reasonable for a single machine. Instead I tracked down OSXvnc to run the VNC server on the mini and Chicken of the VNC to run as the VNC client on my PowerBook. OSXvnc is such a nice VNC server, it even configures the StartupItem for itself so I have the VNC server running at boot time. I was concerned about the GUI coming up without a monitor attached, but Apple has tweaked Mac OS X somehow so I had absolutely no problem. When I connect to the mini over VNC I see the login window and do all of the GUI-related things I want.

I have much more to do with the Mac mini, including hooking up video grabbing hardware. But I can say that everyone should have a mini for their server. It makes life so nice, even for Windows users (Mac OS X Server has full support to be a primary domain controller and offer Windows file sharing).

kherr @ 23:28 CST | link | tech