Will this set up work?

[Anonymous]

I’d like to set up a Mac mini 1.42 as a file server, web host, and print server for an office with 12 Windows PC’s.

An article at Lowendmac.com recommended using OSX with some shareware tweaks to take care of this, but Server 10.4 with its spam control is tempting and likely easier to set up and adminster…

What’s your opinion? Am I insane to try this with out an XServe?

Thanks for any advice or comments…

Marty

[maccanada]

I wouldn’t go as far as insane…more masochistic 🙂
The Minis are not servers. They don’t have either redundant or Gigabit ethernet, they use laptop hard drives that are not designed to run continuously, they’re hard to secure physically, they have no hardware monitoring capabilities, they can only have 1 GB of RAM, they’re hugely limited in their internal hard drive capacity, they have no (sensible) way of protecting your data via RAID, and they have a single G4 processor.

Finally, and this fairly important if you want to go with OS X Server, the Xserves come with a licensed copy of OSXS, the Minis don’t so you’ll have to buy a copy. With 12 users you’ll need the unlimited version – unless 2 of your users don’t mind not being able to use the server until 2 others disconnect. With that, your Mini, even if you buy the cheapest one, with no extra memory and the smallest HDD is already half the cost of an Xserve.

Having said that; they’re cheap, you can add FireWire drives and you may not need G5 processing power, more than 1GB of RAM or Gigabit ethernet.

It’ll certainly run OS X Server…you won’t get the uptime of an Xserve, and you won’t get the life-span of an Xserve, but you may save money initially. However, will that initial saving offset everything else (performance problems, reliability issues, hardware replacement costs) over the lifetime of its use. You’re the one that will be called upon to fix things, so it’s really your call.

[Author]

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