
Mac Mini colocation - pw
http://www.macminicolo.net/
======
jbellis
3 OS X machines gave me more trouble than 100s of linux boxes. They kept
locking up, hard, whenever load got above "looked at severely." We had
remotely controllable PDUs, so we could power cycle over ssh, but it was still
a pita.

No matter how much you love OS X on the desktop, I would stay the hell away
from it in the server room. Apple just doesn't care enough to fix the
problems, and/or there aren't enough people using it that way to get all the
kinks out.

I'm also pretty sure mac mini's don't have ECC memory. And ECC is not optional
on a server: <http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf>

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colonelxc
I guess (as a linux junkie) I don't see the draw of using a Mac as a server.
Anyone care to share their likes/dislikes of OS X Server?

~~~
blasdel
As a hacker who had 3-4 xServes for several years, do not run OS X Server by
choice. If you need your server app to run on OS X because you are making some
crazy decisions in your life, use the standard client OS X. The Server version
adds bullshit and pain, and doesn't remove any of the standard Desktop
bullshit. The only bad thing about xServes is that Apple doesn't support
running the standard OS X on them!

If by hook or by crook you find yourself as a developer running OS X Server,
do not use the built-in Apache or any of that shit. Compile it all yourself
with MacPorts, and manage it as if it were just another unix box. The only
Apple provided services you should use are SSH, NFS, SMB, and NetBoot.

I was mostly running them for NetBoot (doable from Linux, but it's already
enough of a PiTA on big heterogenous networks), and because it was the most
politically viable means to have root on some non-CS servers at my school --
otherwise they'd be Windows or old RHEL, domesticated into the domain, with
storage on an anemic SAN, and probably virtualized to death.

As a sole server for a small business, it would not actually be too bad, as
long as you weren't trying to host real webapps from it using the included
Apache, and didn't really try to use the OpenDirectory stuff. The file sharing
stuff works, Mail/Calendar/Contacts server stuff is pretty well done, and the
Wiki server is fucking fantastic -- I saw it demoed at a Leopard tech talk in
December 2006 and still haven't seen a better rich text editing interface in a
browser. Unfortunately nobody used it because they stuck with 10.4 Server as
the core OS in 10.5 Server was riddled with regressions (I've heard 10.6
Server is a _brand new day_ )

~~~
sailormoon
I had an app that needed to take snapshots of web pages, and the client was
very picky about the image quality. OSX exposes WebKit in such a way that I
could get very nice snapshots, and I could never get anything close on Linux
so a mac was the tool of choice. It sat there doing absolutely nothing besides
running a web service that would occasionally take a pic of a web page and
hand it back to the real linux server, and it did that fine for a long time.

I think the main issue I had was with software update. Apple provides an
interactive command line interface to their update program so you could write
some scripts to do it but in practise I just did it manually every once in a
while. A couple of times it didn't reboot cleanly and got stuck on a firmware
update or something so a manual power cycle was in order.

I also had a couple of weird problems where the machine would become
unresponsive if it hadn't been rebooted for a long time. Never really got to
the bottom of that but it would be something to consider if you were going to
use them "seriously".

~~~
vog
WebKit is part of Qt and thus available for any platform.

Or did I miss something?

~~~
blasdel
The Qt version (and Chrome's version) uses the platform to do the font
rendering, which on everything but OS X and Windows would be freetype.

If the client wanted Apple's particular font rendering, they'd have to use
their version of Webkit. The least-shitty way to do that is to write a Webkit
app for OS X (there's also the Windows version of Safari, but that would
involve a lot of bullshit)

~~~
sailormoon
Yep, that's exactly it.

Didn't even have to write an app - I used this excellent tool:
<http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/>

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carson
I completely forgot about these guys but I think they have been doing this for
a while. I can think of a number of reasons you might want to do this and one
of those would be to use the Apple HTTP video streaming software that was
released last year.

It is also interesting that GoDaddy just released OSX hosting although at a
higher cost using XServe boxes and Parrallels.
<http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/mac-hosting.aspx>

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matthew-wegner
They also regularly post "The State of the Mac Mini" with details and opinion
on hardware refreshes. Their last one is here:
<http://www.macminicolo.net/state2009.html>

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gchpaco
I've had my Mac through these folks for a while; I was unwilling to give up
the idea of owning the gear (so VPSes were out) and was pretty happy with the
thing in general. I run Linux on it.

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cjbprime
The bandwidth pricing is extremely expensive -- for comparison, I pay $60/mo
for a VM with 1500GB/mo transfer, yet they'd ask $250/mo _just for bandwidth
charges_ for 1000GB/mo.

~~~
petercooper
I'm looking into getting a Mac Mini for some screenshot production and iWeb is
offering them with 1500GB for ~$120 a month. That includes the actual machine
though, so isn't colo exactly.

~~~
cjbprime
Thanks, that looks _much_ better -- they do colo too, and with a year contract
they appear to offer for $44/mo what macminicolo wants $155/mo for. (500G
transfer.)

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cjbprime
Does anyone know if Linux on the Mac Mini can address 8GB RAM? (I know it
didn't work on versions of OS X pre-Snow Leopard, so I'm wondering if there's
some incompatible special sauce that makes it work there, rather than
something simple like turning PAE on.)

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enduser
ECC memory is a must for server applications, and Mac Minis--including the
"server" model--do not come with or support ECC memory.

<http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html>

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jdietrich
What is the advantage over a VPS?

~~~
cjbprime
By up-fronting the cost of the hardware, you're going to get many times more
CPU and RAM and faster disk I/O than if you were one user of many on a VPS. If
you priced out a VPS with 8G of RAM and a dedicated CPU, it would be many
hundreds of dollars per month.

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pw
Any thoughts on this?

~~~
anurag
No personal experience, but manybooks.net is a popular (mostly public domain)
ebook site that has been running well on macminicolo.net for several years
now.

<http://manybooks.net/about/>

~~~
manybooks
I run manybooks.net -- only have good things to say about macminicolo; they're
responsive to tech queries, have decent pricing in my experience (and have
been very good about switching my plan when bandwidth usage spiked), and I
haven't noticed any bottlenecks in their setup. They're also notable, in my
experience, for not CAUSING any trouble with my server or the network itself.

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freebsd_dude
Cool idea but a rather expensive way to go (if you consider hardware +
colocation fee) compared with a VPS. Although the mac mini is dedicated its
laptop parts make it on par or worse than a good VPS performance-wise.

Id be more inclined to use a mac mini as a server on a local network as
opposed to colocating. Another interesting application is a cluster of mac
minis-that a whole other area.

