[infowarrior]

Thinking of getting a Mac Mini to run Tiger Server for a home server for basic filesharing, web, email, ftp serving for the family and friends. I think the Mini is ideal since it's above all, a Mac, quiet, and unobtrusive.....as I have 5 servers (all BSD intel boxes) in the home office, the Mini's size and quietness is attractive to me.

Anything major I should know about or consider beforehand?

Thanks in advance!

[GSixZero]

It's a good choice. The main drawback would be the slow hard drive. This may not be a concern depending on the specific uses, but if you added a firewire drive, you'd be golden.

[mduell]

I think it will be fine for small scale web/email/ftp serving, but with a slow disk and 100BT ethernet it may be a bit slow for filesharing.

Also, you don't need to shell out the cash for Tiger Server ($500-1000 OS on a $500 machine that already comes with an OS? ). You can run file sharing, web, mail, and ftp servers on the client version.

[infowarrior]

Originally Posted by mduell

I think it will be fine for small scale web/email/ftp serving, but with a slow disk and 100BT ethernet it may be a bit slow for filesharing.

Also, you don't need to shell out the cash for Tiger Server ($500-1000 OS on a $500 machine that already comes with an OS? ). You can run file sharing, web, mail, and ftp servers on the client version.

True, but I like the Tiger GUI and admin tools. They come standard, and I won't need to spend a gazillion bucks on TenonTools or a lot of time compiling freeware interfaces for these services.

[hoodmulti]

OSX in general is pretty slow for server application due to it is bottleneck at multi thread applications.
The impact from the OS is so great that the hardware's performance became negligible.
But as a very general server with a nice nice GUI, it shouldn't be a problem.


For a full detail on where the problem lies, check the articles below:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc...i=2520&p=2

[tooki]

Do a search, this question's been asked a bazillion times all over the internet.

tooki