Colocate Your Mac mini

Pfhreak writes "Pure Static is already offering a service to colocate your Mac mini into a rack for those who want to set up a server on the cheap. Unfortunately, according to their FAQ, they're not planning on creating a Mini supercomputer. Which could be good news for those of you that are working towards being the first to set up such a cluster who have purchased a couple pallets of Minis, but haven't had time to finish setting up the cluster."

Comments

I can't resist....

[fm6]

...giving a blurb for my former employer Hurricane Electric, even though I despise the idiot who owns the place. They'll rent you cabinet space that is probably not much more expensive than a MacMini "condo". And they provide 24/7 human intervention for free, something MacMiniColo charges extra for.

Also, I'd wonder about any colo facility located in a former bank vault. It sounds cool, but it doesn't strike me as a very cost-effective place to put a data center.

run away!

[bill_mcgonigle]

...giving a blurb for my former employer Hurricane Electric

I used to use these guys in the '90s. They screwed up the billing, claimed my CC# was giving an 'error code' (it wasn't, it was fine for everthing else) and instead of doing something like, say, calling me on the phone, they deleted all my files and canceled my account without notice.

Buyer beware.

Re:run away!

[bill_mcgonigle]

I'm currently using 1&1 and so far, so good.

If you get the root server account ($50/mo) you have your own machine so you could install FreeBSD or whatever you want on it. The rescue disc image is debian linux though, so you'd have to be conversant with that for dealing with a crashed filesystem (and sure that the resuce disc has the appropriate filesystem modules on it for your FreeBSD partitions).

Really though, if you're just interested in a shell account there's not a heck of a lot of difference between a FreeBSD and a Linux shell account (and we're happy about it!).

Re:Running OSX without GUI

[Puggs]

yes

login as '>console' as the user

i may have the details slightly wrong, but ive been up for 30hrs, so please forgive me for not checking.......

Macminicolo.com

[Special_K_21]

Macminicolo.com has been up for some time, since launch day as far as I can tell.

Heat dissipation

[babbage]

I was looking at this site the other day. My first impression was that it was a pretty good idea -- you have this cheap little computer that would be more than adequate for running a website &/or mail server, and it's small enough that you could get dozens of them of a single rack.

Then it dawned on me that the Mac Mini doesn't have a fan, and depends entirely on being able to vent heat around the bottom edges and back panel. Apple's site has a document warning users:

Always place your Mac mini on a hard, flat surface to provide maximum airflow to the computer's vents around the rubber base. Don't put anything on top of your Mac mini or stack Mac minis on top of each other either.

Sounds like a dense rack full of the things would be liable to overheat & burn out.

Are these people thinking about cooling issues? Their FAQ page made no mention of it last week, and it looks like it still doesn't now. Would anyone trust a rack full of these things not to cook the circuitry?

Poor Cluster

[vijayiyer]

Real clusters use high speed networking like InfiniBand or Myrinet to reduce latency to tolerable levels. Anything else is just a bunch of computers hooked together for trivially parallelizable problems. Seeing as how there aren't expansion slots in the Mac Mini, I really don't see the point.

Re:Running OSX without GUI

[Johnny Mnemonic]

Apple publishes a very nice cli reference manual

You don't have a link, by any chance?

Command-Line Administration

More docs

Re:Mac Mini Cluster??

[Lars T.]

For some things you don't <i>need</I>memory bandwidth - including RC5-72. And the Opteron, sorry, sucks ass at it. <a href="http://n0cgi.distributed.net/speed/">See for yourself</A>.

Processor, MHz, #, Score (in keys/sec)
AMD Opteron 2420 1 9,547,969.00
AMD Opteron 1600 4 24,101,848.00
AMD Opteron 1792 2 9,891,998.00
AMD Opteron 2000 2 15,145,274.67
AMD Opteron 2200 2 15,099,050.00
PowerPC 744x/745x G4 1250 1 13,123,240.83
PowerPC 744x/745x G4 1333 1 13,918,160.25
PowerPC 744x/745x G4 1400 1 14,769,045.00
PowerPC 744x/745x G4 1416 1 15,045,897.00
PowerPC 970 G5 1600 1 8,360,235.00
PowerPC 970 G5 1800 1 13,147,178.00
PowerPC 970 G5 2000 1 15,057,412.00
PowerPC 970 G5 2000 2 28,715,624.55
PowerPC 970 G5 2400 2 31,000,000.00
PowerPC 970 G5 2500 2 33,962,933.71

Mac OS X is n FreeBSD

[@madeus]

OS X is essentially FreeBSD with a pretty GUI on top.

Mac OS X is based on Rhapsody (with a new Window Manager theme and the core display technology being display PDF rather than being display PostScript), which is based on OPENSTEP, which is based on NeXTSTEP which is based on mach and UNIX from Berkeley.

There are BITS of FreeBSD in Mac OS X, but there also BITS of FreeBSD in multiple releases of Windows.

Like FreeBSD, it's a UNIX implimentation, but it's a very different style of UNIX implimentation from FreeBSD and it's not based on FreeBSD.

FWIW, you don't have to run the Quartz Window Manager either BTW, you can just choose to not start it. I'm tempted to say your better off with Debian on a lower end G4 PowerPC system like the mini though.