Mac Mini Server Guide

Apple has a long feature list on its Leopard Server Feature page, but honestly, it assumes you already know you need a server. That's just not helpful to a lot of folks.

I'll try to explain the main features that may make setting up a server for your family, organization, or business worth your while.

1. Time Machine: The security blanket

Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) comes with a nice feature called Time Machine. If you don't already know what it is, then check out Apple's Time Machine Page.

What makes Time Machine so great is that it backs up your computer automatically over the network once you get it set up! Should you need to recover a file, you just go into Time Machine at a time in which you had the file, and voila! there it is.

What Leopard Server will allow you to do is set up your server as the single backup point for all the computers in your family, organization, or business.

Imagine having a backup system for all of the computers in your family, organization, or business in one location. Now imagine having that convenience and security, all without having to have an administrator do it! That's the beauty of using your server as a Time Machine server.

(Real World Proof: This one feature alone saves me about five hours a month while giving me the same assurance of my older system)


2. File Sharing: Nevermore a missing file!
   

It's hard to express how convenient it is to have networked data. By activating the File Sharing service on Leopard Server, you can start to share data over the network immediately. When a file becomes a network asset, you don't have to worry about the latest copy being on some individual user's computer - any changes to that file appear for everyone! No longer will you have to merge three or four documents into one to have all of the correct information!

It gets better, though. If any of your users ever need access to those files when they're not at home, work, or wherever your server is set up, they can remote in and manipulate the files as if they were there. Never be without a file, anywhere in the world, as long as you have access to the Internet.


3. iCal Server: Get Everybody in Sync!

Coordinating multiple people and resources is one of the biggest struggles for families, organizations, and businesses. iCal Server allows the sharing and delegation of calendars to others, and all updates happen in real time.

So, your administrative assistant can make appointments for you, or other members of your workgroup, and those appointments seamlessly show up for you and the rest of the team. Like file sharing, this works when you leave home, your office, or your organization's headquarters.


4. Wiki Server: Share and Collaborate with Ease!

Leopard's Wiki Server service enables your family, organization, or business to quickly share information and notes on their projects. Rather than sending multiple documents around, start a wiki and allow your users to help create and edit the information relevant to your survival in a dynamic way.

To be honest, I completely underestimated how useful this would be. Once your family, organization, or business "Goes Wiki," there's a quantum leap in information sharing that happens. If you work or live in a dynamic atmosphere where timely information is critical, you absolutely must give a wiki a try.

Leopard Server comes with so much more than these features, but these are the ones I think are the most valuable for almost any type of organization.

The Mac Mini makes an ideal server for three reasons:

1. It's Small

Sure, you could buy a MacPro or an Xserve, but where are you going to put it? The Mac Mini is small enough to be hidden away on a printer stand, behind other computers, or almost anywhere out of the way. My MiniServer, with its external hard drive attached, is about 4" tall and a little bit wider than a CD case. (The picture above is where it's located and how it stacks up, sizewise, to other electronics.)


2. It's Affordable

The Mac Mini itself will only set you back about $700 (with memory and shipping). If you choose to have an external hard drive, you'll have to add a few hundred dollars extra depending on what hard drive you get.


3. It's Energy Saving and Environmentally Friendly

The Mac Mini is made from a lot of the same parts that go into Apple's laptops. These components draw less energy, so the cost of running the server, electricity-wise, will be far less than running a MacPro or an Xserve. You might not think it's that big of a deal, but a Mac Pro or Xserve can cost an additional $20 a month just in electricity costs!

There are, however, some disadvantages to having the Mac Mini as your server:

1. Where's my storage, man?

The most notable disadvantage to using a Mac Mini as a server is its pathetically small hard drive and lack of high speed ports to connect other hard drives into. The largest hard drive configuration available is 160GBs, which won't get you very far, and the fastest port is a Firewire400. This is the single biggest drawback, as there are not a lot of workarounds for storage.

There are some ways to hack into the Mac Mini and add larger hard drives, but all of these hacks void your warranty. Rather than do that, I'd suggest you get an external hard drive for file sharing and Time Machine and run everything else off of the MacMini's internal hard drive.

I'll give suggestions for hard drives and setups in the next module that discusses what you'll need to buy.

Edit: The new Mac Mini has more storage capacity; it can be upgraded to 320GB of storage. This is great news, as it's now a perfect fit for networked files, iCal, Wikis, etc.

This is still not sufficient for Time Machine Backups, but it's far better to have the external hard drive be dedicated for Backups and having the rest of the files on the Mac Mini's internal hard drive. That way, if either hard drive fails, you either have the backups or the working files, rather than having everything on both. The networked files will also be served faster with and


2. No configuration options

This dovetails in with the last disadvantage, but if you use aMac Mini as a server, you're pretty much stuck with it as is. You'll not be able to load PMCIA cards, video cards, etc. onto it - if you can't route it through its FW400 port or 4 USB hubs, then you're out of luck.

Edit: The new Mac Mini has a FW800 port. For comparison, the FW800 port is about twice as fast as the FW400. This is not a theoretical difference - you will be able to tell a difference in transfer speeds.


3. Not quite server grade components

Apple didn't design the Mac Mini to be a server, so you may find some limitations in longevity and durability. Your Mac Mini will live longer if you let it power-down for a few hours a day (recommended from 1am to 6am when nobody' working), and I recommend you get Applecare with it.

You may have noticed that I didn't have processing power as a disadvantage of using a Mac Mini as a server. For all but the most intense applications, the Mac Mini serves without a hiccup. For example, my server never spikes above 15% computer processing unit utilization, and it gets its fair share of use as a file sharing, web, wiki, and iCal server.

In my experience, people overestimate how powerful they'll need their server to be. You could start with a Mac Mini server and then upgrade as your needs outgrow its abilities to meet them.

You could get away with just the basics above, but I recommend you buy an external hard drive to get the most use out of your Mac Mini server. I use and like this one from Other World Computing:
1 TB MiniStack v3 External Hard Drive.

It fits right under the Mac Mini, has similar designs, and has 1TB of storage. Note that you can daisy chain multiples of these, if you need to.

A point to consider: You'll want to partition your Hard Drive if you want your computers to back up to the hard drive using Time Machine. Time Machine saves on the hour, once a day, and once a week until it fills the hard drive, at which point it'll delete the oldest backup. If you don't check it, it'll eat up your entire hard drive with backups!

Partitioning it will set a maximum to the amount that will be used for backups. The standard recommendation is to take the amount of data, in GBs, that you have on your computers and multiply that by 1.5. That's how much space you'll need for your Time Machine partition.

Example:
You have two laptops with 120 GB Hard Drives and one iMac with a 320 GB Hard Drive. It's recommended that you allocate 840 GB for the backup volume for those computers.

You can make the requirements for backups lighter by using file sharing and not backing up applications. Analyze your user's backup needs to get a more fine-grained estimate, keeping in mind that Time Machine compresses data before transmitting it and it does not backup unused disk space. (In other words, my 320GB iMac with 145 GB used data has a 100 GB Time Capsule file.)

Edit: As I mentioned above, the new 320GB hard drive capacity makes a huge difference in how to deploy the server. If you're going to be using it as a file server, get the largest hard drive and store your served files on the internal hard drive. Use the external hard drive for Time Machine backups, that way there's no way possible for one hard drive failure to take all of your data with it.

The hard part is mostly done! You may not believe me on it, but it really is.

Here's the best words of advice I can give on this one: Wait until you have all the components before you install Leopard Server and start setting it up, and wait until you have the server up and running before you add client computers.

In my excitement to get my server going, I set it up before my hard drive came in. That resulted in a lot of headaches, as migrating the data was not as easy as the rest. Give it a few extra days unless you absolutely need it today.

I hate to say "Read the Manual," but it really does lay it out pretty well.

Since this is already a really long lens, I'll stop here. I'll add troubleshooting techniques as I compile all the links I had to use to get it up and going after I messed it up the first time. Most of it was user error - but some was just jankey-ness.

For instance, iCal Server will give you fits until you change your host name (under Server Admin) to mycomputername.mydomainname.com rather than the default mydomainname.com that iCal Server defaults to. That solution took me days to find, but it corrected the iCal server's bugs immediately.