[dice]

I want to turn my Mac Mini into a basic server.

Given that it is a 1.42GHz G4 with 1GB of RAM what is the best OS to install on it. I'm most comfortable with OS X and have each revision up to 10.5.

Can I disable certain parts of OS X so it runs faster when not connected to a screen?

I plan to have multiple USB drives plugged into it and I want both Windows and OS X machines to be able to access these drives and the files on them. Some drives are HFS+ and some are FAT32. So I guess I need to setup both SMB and AFP?

It will be plugged directly into a router and most of the machines will connect via WiFi.

It will also perform the duty of very light webserver.


Thanks for your help

[Andrew Stephens]

Your G4 Mac Mini should make a good server. Obviously the internal drive space is limited but your plan for external drives so that's not a problem.

You may be better off with a big firewire drive rather than usb. you can daisy chain a second drive off of the first if you need to. Two 1GB external drives should do well. LaCie make an external drive that contains two drives so you can specify either one large drive or two small drives raided in case of drive failure.

Enable smb services on the mini and set up your sharing to make the drives you want accessable and both Macs and PC's will be able to read and write to them.

Your PC may need additional software to enable it to see an HFS+ volume but that's better than running the drives as FAT32 (IMHO)

You should be able to set up media and iTunes sharing easily enough as well.

I'd add a bit more RAM and run 10.5 since the machine won't be over stressed, it's just serving files up. That way you can run it headless once set up and use screen sharing on another 10.5 enabled Mac to admin it remotely.

[kylef]

Originally Posted by dice 

I want to turn my Mac Mini into a basic server.

Given that it is a 1.42GHz G4 with 1GB of RAM what is the best OS to install on it. I'm most comfortable with OS X and have each revision up to 10.5.

Can I disable certain parts of OS X so it runs faster when not connected to a screen?

I plan to have multiple USB drives plugged into it and I want both Windows and OS X machines to be able to access these drives and the files on them. Some drives are HFS+ and some are FAT32. So I guess I need to setup both SMB and AFP?

It will be plugged directly into a router and most of the machines will connect via WiFi.

It will also perform the duty of very light webserver.


Thanks for your help

I've also turned my Mac Mini 1.42GHz into a miniature download and streaming server - although it only has 512MB RAM and is running Tiger (10.4). Generally speaking, it runs very well. To access it, I use Apple's Remote Desktop. You can screen-share over Leopard, but I've heard that it runs very sluggishly with only 512MB RAM and Leopard. Perhaps your 1GB will be a bit better!

If you can, I'd recommend formatting the drives in HFS+ and not FAT32, as the latter will only accept file-transfers of no bigger than 4GB. FYI the xbox 360 supports both, if you have one.

Originally Posted by Andrew Stephens 

Your G4 Mac Mini should make a good server. Obviously the internal drive space is limited but your plan for external drives so that's not a problem.

You may be better off with a big firewire drive rather than usb. you can daisy chain a second drive off of the first if you need to. Two 1GB external drives should do well. LaCie make an external drive that contains two drives so you can specify either one large drive or two small drives raided in case of drive failure.

Enable smb services on the mini and set up your sharing to make the drives you want accessable and both Macs and PC's will be able to read and write to them.

Your PC may need additional software to enable it to see an HFS+ volume but that's better than running the drives as FAT32 (IMHO)

You should be able to set up media and iTunes sharing easily enough as well.

I'd add a bit more RAM and run 10.5 since the machine won't be over stressed, it's just serving files up. That way you can run it headless once set up and use screen sharing on another 10.5 enabled Mac to admin it remotely.

I was wondering about this, thanks for the clarification.

[dice]

Great, thanks for the replies. I would prefer Firewire external drives but we already have multiple USB ones!

Hmm... as for formatting as HFS+... I don't think I'll be able to do this as the FAT32 drives are in use by my windows using g/f.

I think 1GB of RAM is the max this mini can take...

Should I do anything to aid cooling if it is on for extended amount of time. I'm slightly concerned about it's little laptop drive overheating and dying!