Setting up OS/X Server

After years of watching Linux progress and, finally, getting to a point where I could say “hey, that wasn’t too bad,” after setting up a new server — I’ve had my entire metric reset.

Today my new Mac Mini arrived. I bought it with the intention of putting it to use as a small server for my personal projects. Accordingly, after downloading OS/X Server from the Apple Developer Connection, I got right to work:

0. Boot my new server
This was a tough one. I had to unplug my display from my G5 and plug it into the mini, dig out a spare keyboard, and hit the power switch. Well, that worked pretty well.

1. Install OS/X Server
Mini’s don’t come with OS/X Server. I logged in, set up my account, and went right to ADC to download OS/X Server. This was by far the most painful as it took a couple hours to download (must be either a hammered server or a really bad internet connection today). Anyhow, once that was downloaded I opened the installer package and ran OSXServerInstaller.mpkg. It took about 20 minutes and after a reboot, I had a full-blown OS/X Server.

2. Set up mail services
The Server Admin tool make that pretty easy. I configured the mailserver for my domain, added spam filtering, SSL connections and an IMAP as well as POP daemon. All with a few point-and-clicks, it took maybe 15 minutes.

3. Web services
This was even easier. It pretty much amounted to checking the “Web services” and “Weblog” checkboxes.

Doing this set up a web server (Apache 1.3 with quite a healthy array of plug-ins, though 2.0 is available too), a front-end web cache for performance, and this blog (based on the open source Blojsom blogger).

4. Remote desktop
The Mini is going into my equipment closet, so I turned on Apple Remote Desktop and can now login remotely, from my G5 (which, thankfully, now has it’s monitor back).

That was it. You are now seeing the fruits of my labor, after roughly two or three hours of work.

The Mac Mini makes a great small-scale server and would probably be fine even for small office situations. The only limitation I see, and it’s easily enough solved with a firewire drive, is that it has no internal backup solution. But I might just have it ‘rsync’ a copy of the drive over to my G5 every night; I don’t see any particular need to put a physical drive next to the machine.