Flutterby™! : Home Servers 2005-02-02 06:08:19.566538+00

Home Servers

2005-02-02 06:08:19.566538+00 by Dan Lyke 5 comments

Tom Negrino is thinking about a Mac Mini for a home server, partially justifying the cost of a new machine based on electricity savings. I've got a better suggestion: How about a Via Eden based Linux or FreeBSD machine? Sure, the stock case for a built-up machine from, say, iDot is a little larger, but you'll save both capital costs (for $500 you could have a gig of RAM and a 120 gig hard drive!) and operating expenses (probably sub 15 watts, depending on your hard drive), and have a PCI slot to play with as well!

Okay, I'll stop trolling now.

My always-on home server is a Via Eden box (from iDot, as it happens), running Fedora Core 3. The only problem--surprisingly--has been noise. I replaced the stock CPU fan with a slower, quieter model, and replaced an old IBM Deskstar drive that predated fluid bearings with a new 160Gb Maxtor. Now it sits quietly under my desk running Samba and Apache.

Some additional thoughts: use the fanless Eden (the latest is up to 1Ghz) and boot off a Flash Card. I'm using this setup for my aerial photography platform. Unfortuantely, I'm using WinMe for the OS right but it boots almost instantaneously.

My personal advice on what to buy always comes down to the same question: if you need tech help, who do you call, and what OS's do they support? In our house, Mac tech support is free. I don't know anyone who's willing to do free Linux setup and support, so we'd have to factor in that cost -- and it's not cheap.

Not to mention that the server needs to run two apps (Now Up-to-Date and Retrospect), neither of which works on Linux.

Yeah, I know you were trolling, and admitted that you were trolling, but really, we do think about the machines we buy before we buy them. We don't just knee-jerk pick Macs because we've been brainwashed.

BTW, my personal opinion: I think that the electricity savings are BS. In order to make this setup work, he's also going to have to hook up a firewire hub and two or three external hard drives, and I suspect that that will need power, too. The tower he's giving up, otoh, could have taken internal drives. I'm going along with it because I really want a working backup solution, not the patched-together mess we've got now, and I think that that's worth throwing money at.

#Comment Re: made: 2005-02-03 22:23:59.226945+00 by: ebradway [edit history]

As I've been trying to get a Mac emulator working on a PC for three days now, I highly sympathize. I think the Mac-Mini is a great little box and it's actually hard to match in the PC arena if you already have a license for OS-X server (not to mention, support!).

Also, doesn't the Mini have an internal IDE port? You could still swap out the internal IDE drive for a CompactFlash IDE drive and get the power-savings and noise down further. Stick the old IDE in an external case and plug it in the USB or Firewire, just make it go to sleep quickly!

I think the Mac-Mini is a great little box and it's actually hard to match in the PC arena if you already have a license for OS-X server (not to mention, support!).

The good news is that an Apple Developer membership comes with a limited use version of OS X Server, and our needs are easily within the limits. The bad news is that that ADC membership costs $500/year, but given that we've each got a Tiger book to write (and I should be doing just that right now), it's not an optional purchase for us. OTOH, that $500/year also gets us a significant discount on a single Mac purchase for that year, and given that we usually buy one/year, it's pretty much a wash.

I've already heard some real horror stories about working inside the mini, so I have no plans to go messing about inside other than maybe upgrading the RAM. From what I understand, though, the minis are virtually silent as-is.