I’m new to Mac, but I wanted to try the new Mac Mini Server. They had it in stock at the Apple store so I bought the server, an Apple keyboard and an Airport Extreme wireless router.
The server comes with a 2.53ghz Core 2 Duo, 4 gigs of ram and two 500gig hds, but no dvd drive, in a case the size of the Mac Mini, running Snow Leopard Server.
Fortunately, Snow Leopard Server appears to be a customized form of Linux, running Apache, php, MySql and a few other familiar odds and ends so tweaking the setup shouldn’t to much trouble.
The only problem I had was when I decided to the machine up in raid 1, which meant having to reinstall everything.
Apple provides remote install software on the server install disk, and they say you can use the disk in any windows box with XP service pack 2 or greater, but the setup disks wouldn’t read in my laptop running 64 bit Vista, my desktop with Windows 7 ultimate or my 32 bit Vista machine, so I gave up and plugged my Sony slimline external dvd drive into the server. After that the disks read with no problems.
The other quirk I ran into was that it took two attempts at holding the option key while the machine booted before I got past the white screen and on to the choice of boot drives. –I suspect it was just a matter of the machine taking time to recognize the drive.
Once I was in, changing from two independent drives to mirrored set via the disk utilities only took a couple of minutes, and the entire fresh install, including basic setup took less than an hour.
Of coarse, I’m still trying to figure out the Mac terminology and how to use the gui, but on the recommendation of the man I spoke to at the Apple store I bought Mac OS X Server by Peachpit Press. Hopefully it will get me over the hump.
Setting up my Apple Airport Extreme on the other hand was a royal pain in the ass. After a bunch of attempts and enough frustration that I considered taking it back to the store I reset my cable modem and low and behold it worked. –It turns out that you need to use the reset button on your cable modem, not just disconnect the power, wait 30 seconds and plug it back in, because the modem has an internal battery that allows it to hold the previous configuration in case of power outage.
Beyond that, the only real snag was that the software doesn’t seem to like my Windows 7 machine, so it would connect and disconnect fairly rapidly when I tried to setup the router. No big deal, I tossed the disk into my server and everything worked fine.
I chose wpa2 for my encryption, but I discovered that the router will also allow wep connections, so I don’t have to change all my nics at once.
On the whole I like my new toys. The router is doing it’s job without a problem and the server is not only silent, it’s barely warm after running for 24hrs.
—All I need to do now is learn to speak Apple.
