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Colocate Your Mac mini

Posted by michael on from the first-to-market dept.

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."

5 of 164 comments (clear)

  1. I can't resist.... by fm6 · · Score: 3, Informative
    ...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.

  2. Heat dissipation by babbage · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

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    DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
  3. Poor Cluster by vijayiyer · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Running OSX without GUI by Johnny+Mnemonic · · Score: 4, Informative


    Apple publishes a very nice cli reference manual

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

    Command-Line Administration

    More docs

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    $tar -xvf .sig.tar
  5. Mac OS X is n FreeBSD by @madeus · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.