Slashdot Mirror
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."
mmm, chocolate mac mini
I've heard from several locations how desireable it would be to have a Mac Mini cluster. I hope the submitter was joking because does that make any sense? For one the maximum amount of RAM you can have is 1GB, the processor is not 64bit and gigabit ethernet is not available. I'm not saying a sub $500 Dell is the way to go. You can by an Xserve dual 2.3Ghz G5 machine for $2300. I bet one of those would outperform five Mac Minis.
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.
Colocate a Linux server, which is almost made to be administered remotely. Macs are made to be seen, used, and not heard. Unless you're running Garageband or iTunes.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
...who has the following in their welcome Flash movie?
The site is overloaded.
you loose paying customers.
Emphasis is mine. Lack of capitalization and bad spelling is theirs.
from the FAQ
How often will that happen if they put a bunch of these in a rack togeter? laptop drive running 24/7.... hmmm. In an encloded space jammed up against other minis.... hmmm. seems like a bad idea to me. Better to get a used xserve.
I think, the form-factor is great. However, that said they would make a lousy server. It has a very slow, laptop HDD not at all optimized for use 7/24. They are not equipped with an adequate fan for cooling the unit if packed densely (like the photoshoped up "condo" on the Pure Static website.) If packed that tight, I bet the MBTF of the drive (and other components) drops to under two months or something insanely short like that.
Google "IBM Deskstar drive failure" to find out when non-server spec drives are used in a 7/24/365 environment
The final remaining issue with the mini-as-server idea is the external power brick. Wall-warts are the bane of any server installation. Very tough to work around. Potential fire hazard if not handled properly.
All that said, I expect we will see some clients who send us Minis to colo. We will probably treat them like we did iMacs & G4 Cubes - Put them on well ventilated shelves, in open racks. NOT pack them tight in a cabinet.
And with the Mini, just like the companies that popped up claiming to be "the place" to colo your [G4, Cube, Xserve, insert Apple product here] in the end, digital.forest will still have more of them colocated. Why? We have been doing it longer, have a better facility, and better support. We have knowledgeable systems administrators ON SITE 7/24, who understand MacOS, MacOS X, as well as other UNIX flavors and Win32. We are in our 11th year, opening our third facility. We are a known quantity, with a reputation for quality. Not just some guy who registered a domain name on January 12th.
However... all this interest in using them as servers should be a big honkin' clue to Apple!
They need to make "Xserve Lite" 1U - 18" X 18" X 1.75"
one or two drives
one 64-bit pci slot (for an FC card)
1 usb port front and one in back
ditto firewire
built-in video
(low-end admins need video... lame I know, but check the lists and forums about how many people freak when their G5 Xserve arrives sans video card)
Ideal would be video front and back, ala the Dell servers
No need for the goofy split case of the Xserve (I have seen two fall apart in a rack)
No need for those gawd-awful "whack a paddle/kill the server" drive sleds. (I want to find the engineer in Cupertino who designed this and beat them senseless - with one of these lame drive sleds! Sure, they look nice, but they are functionally worthless. Except perhaps as a blunt object to beat people with.)
$1000 price point.
"workgroup server" or "lightweight web server"
No need even for OS X Server, just MacOS
An option to buy Server if you need filesharing for more than X users.
If there really is a market for people to shoehorn an low-end DESKTOP machine into a server role... then Apple should address it. Especially something as ill-suited to server work as the Mac Mini.
--chuck goolsbee
vp tech ops
digital.forest
seattle, wa
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:
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?
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
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.
That sound's painful and I'm sure it would be against the reverse engineering clauses in your license agreement.
Tish, boom - I'll be here all week.
Apple publishes a very nice cli reference manual
You don't have a link, by any chance?
Command-Line Administration
More docs
--
$tar -xvf
The mini mac has some nice features , especially media related. But these would surely be wasted - like the graphics card.
Surely there's a better option than this?; even powerPC based and similar price range? I'm suprised a slashdotter hasn't said this yet.
A blog I run for the wealth
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.