Apple Mac mini MC408LL/A Snow Leopard Server
June 23rd, 2010 | 54 views |
- 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor
- Dual 500GB Serial ATA Hard Drives, 4GB of Memory
- NVIDIA GeForce 9400M Graphics, Built-in AirPort Extreme 802.11n Wi-Fi3 and Bluetooth 2.1
- Mini DVI to DVI Adapter, 5 USB 2.0 ports, 1 FireWire 800 port, Gigabit Ethernet
- Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard preinstalled
Product Description
What is Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server? Exactly what you’d expect – a Mac mini specifically designed to be a server with Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server preinstalled. Instead of a SuperDrive, there are two 500GB hard dri… More >>
5 Comments to “Apple Mac mini MC408LL/A Snow Leopard Server”
The new Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server has just been wonderful. We already have about 100 of them running here at Macminicolo as production servers and they’ve performed great.
A few comments on hardware:
- In this machine you have two 500GB drives. By default, they are two separate drives. When you configure on startup, the default prompt is to have your services running on the drive called “Server HD” and the backups go to the drive “Macintosh HD2.” Of course you can change this to however you want, but that is the default.
- You can also put the two drives in RAID 1 or RAID 0. To do this, you’ll need to boot from the restore disc that comes with the machine. Since there is no optical drive on the Macmini, you’ll either need to use the Remote Disk feature and take advantage of a Mac or PC drive on the network. (This works wonderful) Or you can purchase the SuperDrive for MacBook Air which plugs into the USB drive of the Mac mini and works fine. Personally, I’m not a fan of RAID, but I know others are.
- This machine comes with 4GB of RAM, which is more than enough for most things. You can also upgrade to 8GB of RAM if you’d like to crack it open. This isn’t “officially” supported by Apple, but works well.
- Like all other Mac minis before it, this machine is nearly silent. It’s wonderful in that sense. It also runs cooler since the optical drive is what produced most of the heat in the last ones.
- For connectivity, you have a FW800 and 5 USB. For a display, you can use mini DisplayPort or mini DVI. (There is a mini-DVI to DVI converter that comes in the box.) And of course, the machine will also run headless without any problem at all.
And now a couple mentions of software info:
- This machine comes with a license of Unlimited Client Snow Leopard Server. That’s a wonderful deal since it’s $499 if purchased on it’s own. This is a full copy with no limitation. You’ll have the blue card with the serial in your packet.
-The machine will also run Snow Leopard just fine if you’d rather install it on this machine and use your Snow Leopard Server license somewhere else.
- For the first time on these Mac minis, Applecare also covers basic setup of Snow Leopard Server. (This is a separate, expensive option when buying an Xserve.) You can call AppleCare and they’ll help you configure your server. Very useful.
Overall, these new machines are just fantastic. Our customers love them.
Rating: 5 / 5
I love all 7 of my Macs that I use regularly, from portables to 8 cores. I even like the MacMini very much. If you have a spare monitor, keyboard, and mouse, it is a most capable machine to have for the kitchen, basement, or for the kids. With 4GB RAM, the performance is good, and of course, you get all the benefits of OS X, its software, stability, ease of use, etc. The MacMini hardware is worth the money, given the performance. (The server version has no CD/DVD. I bought an ASUS USB external, which works, but not reliably, especially if all the USB ports are in use, and they fill quickly. The power supply for the MacMini USB ports is not over-engineered.)
But this review is for the SERVER edition of the Mini, which basically means I’m commenting on the software. I have been hosting my own domain (web, mail, DNS, file server, firewall, DHCP, etc.) on a standard Mac for about 8 years very successfully, and on a Mac running some sort of Linux before that. I bought OS X 10.4 Server (Tiger) a number of years ago, but it was unusable. With 10.6 out, I hoped that improvements would make server management easier – analogous to OS X (desktop) versus Windows. Though 10.6 Server is substantially improved over 10.4 Server, it still is a royal pain. The server edition of OS X contains a user interface (GUI) intended to simplify the configuration of unix software – pretty much the same software is installed for both desktop and server versions of OS X, hidden in the unix directories. Almost any unix programs on the server but missing from the desktop can be downloaded and installed for free. (There may be exceptions for particular features, like pod-cast production, that you’d need to investigate specifically.)
Ordinary folks who want to host a vanity site at home or share a file server among a few desktops in a small office will find OS X Server daunting and frustrating. If you do not already know how to configure DNS/BIND, you will struggle from the outset – I have a pretty good sense, and still had a hard time. Many of the “aids” that OS X Server provides are just different enough from standard unix/linux conventions that you can’t easily get under the hood to tweak it – the documentation may be clearly written, but is woefully incomplete regarding details and sometimes inaccurate.
OS X Server may support all the features described in their promotional literature, but in no way is it intuitive to configure or manage (in the same way OS X desktop is). For example, the “Internet Sharing” feature of OS X automatically rolls together DHCP, NAT, IP routing, firewall functions and the like. The Server edition requires configuration of each. True, it is MUCH more flexible, but you need to be a unix/network wizard to get it to work in all but the simplest configurations. Before purchasing this product, I advise downloading and reading all the manuals; there are 7 or 8 of them, available at Apple for free. You can decide for yourself your comfort level based on them. Start with a detailed list of requirements for your needs (e.g., hosting more than one web or email domain), then look through the manuals for the information you need to configure it. Plan on needing to reinstall and start from scratch several times before getting it close. Take notes by hand so you remember what you need to do and not do.
If you only need basic services (web site, email, file sharing), I’d recommend a standard OS X machine, MacMini or otherwise, plus a few very affordable utilities from CutEdge Software, which require minimal user sophistication. If you need some of the fancy features of OS X Server, you will need considerable expertise in server and network administration, so much that free alternatives, running on Macs or cheaper hardware, begin to look attractive. In fact, if you are at that level, you may be frustrated by the idiosyncratic and inconsistent use of Apple (e.g., /System/Library or /Network) versus unix (/etc or /usr/bin/) file location conventions. Sometimes they’re integrated or compatible, sometimes not. You could be looking at a big investment of time to figure it out for any given issue.
You should also be aware that, unlike the desktop OS, anytime there is a major OS Server revision (e.g., Leopard to Snow Leopard), you have to buy a new license at full price. There is no upgrade path.
Bottom line: This is a fine computer (5 stars), but the extra ~$300-400 for the software is not worth it (a half-star). For basic domain hosting on Macs, easier, cheaper alternatives exist. If you require OS X Server’s more advanced features, you probably should be using more robust hardware than a MacMini … and you are looking at a big investment of time to learn how to configure/manage them, equivalent to the effort required to learn other server software which is available for free.
Rating: 2 / 5
Couldn’t have been easier to set up! In very little time I had this little wonder serving media to the entire house. I hooked up a WD 4TB Firewire 800 drive locally and then connected it to my 6TB Network Attached Storage device. The Mac Mini Server acts as the central iTunes server, photo library, Time Machine backup repository, and file storage for the whole family. It also has enough CPU Power to encode and upload videos. I rarely hear the fan kick on and it is uses very little electricity which was a huge selling point! You can either drive two 24 inch LCD displays at 1900×1200 using both the mini-DVI and mini display port connections or just use Apple Remote Desktop to run it headless in a closet.
Lastly, the iChat server is pretty cool if you have lots of kids like I do. I could see it also working great for a small office.
I would purchase this again if I had it to do all over and would recommend this to any of my friends.
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a great little machine. I am replacing a cluster of old G4 and G5 XServes that were used as web-application servers with these little guys and I am very happy with these. Even though OS X server is included, I generally replace it with OS X Client for servers dedicated to Apache-WebObjects-MySQL application hosting since I find remote command line administration of OS X Client is more familiar and convenient to me. However if using some of the many other server services, I will leave OS X Server operating system on there.
Before Mac Mini Server arrived on the scene, many were using regular Mac Minis as servers for small sites and small business. Now Apple has endorsed the use of the Mac Mini as an economical server by selling it in this great sub-$1000 package with two 500GB drives. The extra drive is far more useful than the built-in DVD drive in a server usage scenario. You can use software mirroring, or simply use Carbon Copy Cloner to perform automatic nightly backups to the second drive.
And this little machine consumes a fraction of the power of an XServe and provides near silent operation when compared to a noisy whining G5 XServe.
Rating: 5 / 5
I was pleasantly surprised at how much of the open source movement is embodied in the Apple Mac Mini Server and Mac OSX Snow leopard. But, really, nothing comes close to the integration that Apple has pulled off with the graphical interface and the solid UNIX underpinnings. At times, things seem a bit obfiscated, but you don’t ahve to live with this very long to appreciate that Apple really earns the margins they pull down with these models.
Because I wanted the Snow Leopard Server operating system, I decided to do without the internal optical drive. My later purchase of a Samsung external DVD wasn’t quite what I had hoped, so if I had it to do all over again I might have settled for the faster CPU and optical drive of the regular Mac Mini. But that might just be because I went cheap on the DVD drive, opting to save half the price by going outside the Apple brand.
The included documentation is sparse, so you’ll be online reading hours and hours of eye-straining material if you don’t buy a book like the Snow leopard Server Developer Reference. I’ll review that later. Right now I’m having too much fun with the extra-cost Xcode development environment and relearning C, C++ and Cocoa Framework. This is really fun stuff. can you Gnu?
Now our house has mostly Linux boxes and a few fading Windows machines. The MAC OSX Server supports acting as a Windows Domain Controller so you can centralize control, and also acts as an Active Directory controller for your resident Macs. And, it took all of five minutes to get Time Machine to start backups to my network storage unit and reduce any concerns about losing files. Time Machine is very cool – you should read about that all by itself. Nifty interface to your backups.
So, why buy from Amazon? Well, my state has Apple stores, so I’d pay sales tax here even if I ordered from Apple. There was a special deal if you took a credit card from Amazon, so the discount was material. Of course, Apple offered the “free” printer deals, but I’ll take the discount every time.
Nice product. Totally silent. Too bad the Firewire is reaching end-of-support And where is USB 3.0, you should ask.
Rating: 5 / 5