Since many years I am running a small home server, which acts as a file server, local mail-server with IMAP and intranet server. Most of the time I have been using some sort of linux distribution for this (Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake,…). Since two years a 19” rack PC with a VIA Epia-M10000 board has been the server hardware with 360GB disk space. Although this system does not consume a lot of electricity, its power supply has a very noisy fan, due to the 1HU form factor. This noise has been bothering us for a while now and since the Epia-M1000 is also a relatively slow processor, I decided that it is time to move on and switch systems as well. Since all of our client computers at home are now Mac OS X clients, I felt that the Unix based Mac OS X would be the better platform for the server as well, also allowing me to run special software, like the media server for our network media player.
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.
0 Responses
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.