Thanks to virtualization you can install Oracle 10g Express on a Linux or Windows VM and use it from the Mac side (your Java application, Eclipse,…).

I used Ubuntu Ultimate 1.4 on VMware Fusion. Before you can install Oracle 10g express, you have to increase the swap size. In my case the installer reported that the Express Edition requires 750 MB of swap space. I followed these instructions and increased the swap space to 800MB. Since I wanted to use the universal release, I used ‘apt-get install oracle-xe-universal’ to install Oracle (Oracle also offers RPM packages). The rest is straight forward. Just follow the instructions. As you can see in the screenshot, I can contact the 10g database from SQL Developer running on Mac OS X on the same machine. The Ubuntu windows shows the web-interface of Oracle.

I ran the same maven build again (clean install with database scripts and full tests) and now the time went down to 2:50 (from 3:30 with a remote database). The Core 2 Duo of my MacBook Pro had to work hard and memory usage went up to 1.5 GB, but there was enough room to continue working.

So, this is great. Now I have a completely independent mobile software development platform.

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Build speed matters as you see and it was one reason for me to buy a new MacBook Pro to replace my 2 year old PowerBook, which just became too slow for software development as well as other common tasks.

So, today I ran a small unscientific competition between my two systems on our current project, which uses Maven 2 to build and a Oracle 10g database. To reduce dependency on the network connection to the database server (via VPN), I installed a local Oracle 10g Express on separate machine. Later I will try to install the same on a VM.

With maven I ran a clean installation including all tests a couple of times, also to make sure all dependencies have been resolved.

The PowerBook (1.67Ghz G4, 1.5MB RAM, 100Mbit connection) needs on average 7 minutes (it took more than 20 minutes with the VPN connection!). The new MacBook Pro (2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo, 2GB, WLAN connection) finishes the same task in 3 1/2 minutes, which is an acceptable speed. Just run your tests when you get a fresh cup of coffee (you should not sit behind the desk without a break anyhow).

It is also nice, that Eclipse 3.x with MyEclipse and some other plug-ins starts 14 seconds faster on the MacBook Pro.

Considering the costs of development hours, esp. if bugs are not caught on time because skipped testing, I think it is foolish to save money on hardware for software developers. Give them the best and fastest you can get. It will not only motivate them (we love good technology) but also improve productivity and probably quality as well.

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Server hardware
As new hardware I chose my old 15” PowerBook, which has a 1.25Ghz G4 processor and 1.25GB RAM. I have been considering a new Intel powered Mac Mini, but the expense would have been too high at this point and it is better to use 3 year old hardware anyhow. For storage I will be using some of my external Firewire hard-disks.

Every Mac OS X already ships with most of the software, which is needed for a server. The only thing is, that Apple sort of hides its functionality behind the user-friendly front-end of Mac OS X. One could buy an official Mac OS X Server license which has nice administration interfaces and some extra software, but for a home-server, that would be too much and also too expensive.

Backup and Remote Access
I started with backups of the old files on the PowerBook, a clean Mac OS 10.4.6 installation and formating of the external 150GB FW800 disk. Next I enabled remote desktop and remote login (ssh), so that I can administer the new server remotely from my laptop. Apple’s remote desktop service includes support for VNC viewers, so you don’t need the Remote Desktop administration software. With a VNC client like Chicken of the VNC I can now control the server.

File sharing
Next I configured file sharing. With Apple’s sharing control panel you can turn personal and windows file sharing on, but that doesn’t quiet give you the flexibility you will need for a file server with multiple users and different shares. Luckily Michael Horn wrote the tool Sharepoints, which makes it very easy to define shared folders and manage users and groups. With this useful application, the Mac OS X file server was up and running within minutes. If you are a Unix geek, you can of course also configure configuration files with vi directly.

There is a small problem with external disks, like those I am using on my file server. By default Mac OS X only mounts these automatically when a user logs in. But in the case of the file server the external disks should be mounted when the system boots. Here the shareware TinkeTool System can help. On the Volumes tab of System Setup you can enable automatic mount of removable hard disk volumes.

Restoring files
It took the rest of the day to move files from the old to the new file server. Once the mp3 files were moved, I installed the SlimServer and it was delightful, how easy the installation was, compared to a manual installation on a Linux system (actually installing the RPM package on Mandrake etc. is easy as well).

Next we will look at the intranet web- and database server.

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