Mac Mini colocation | Hacker News Reader

Mac Mini colocation

macminicolo.net

43 pointspw33 comments

3 OS X machines gave me more trouble than 100s of linux boxes. They kept locking up, hard, whenever load got above "looked at severely." We had remotely controllable PDUs, so we could power cycle over ssh, but it was still a pita.

No matter how much you love OS X on the desktop, I would stay the hell away from it in the server room. Apple just doesn't care enough to fix the problems, and/or there aren't enough people using it that way to get all the kinks out.

I'm also pretty sure mac mini's don't have ECC memory. And ECC is not optional on a server: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~bianca/papers/sigmetrics09.pdf

I guess (as a linux junkie) I don't see the draw of using a Mac as a server. Anyone care to share their likes/dislikes of OS X Server?

I dont think Mac OS X server is really anything special - Mac OS X itself can be a good server. Unless your using some specific Apple-only technology like Xgrid, plain OSX is fine. And Id only use OSX as a server over linux/bsd if you really want a GUI to administer your server as opposed to command line. The GUI really is the draw of OS X generally over Linux.

As a hacker who had 3-4 xServes for several years, do not run OS X Server by choice. If you need your server app to run on OS X because you are making some crazy decisions in your life, use the standard client OS X. The Server version adds bullshit and pain, and doesn't remove any of the standard Desktop bullshit. The only bad thing about xServes is that Apple doesn't support running the standard OS X on them!

If by hook or by crook you find yourself as a developer running OS X Server, do not use the built-in Apache or any of that shit. Compile it all yourself with MacPorts, and manage it as if it were just another unix box. The only Apple provided services you should use are SSH, NFS, SMB, and NetBoot.

I was mostly running them for NetBoot (doable from Linux, but it's already enough of a PiTA on big heterogenous networks), and because it was the most politically viable means to have root on some non-CS servers at my school -- otherwise they'd be Windows or old RHEL, domesticated into the domain, with storage on an anemic SAN, and probably virtualized to death.

As a sole server for a small business, it would not actually be too bad, as long as you weren't trying to host real webapps from it using the included Apache, and didn't really try to use the OpenDirectory stuff. The file sharing stuff works, Mail/Calendar/Contacts server stuff is pretty well done, and the Wiki server is fucking fantastic -- I saw it demoed at a Leopard tech talk in December 2006 and still haven't seen a better rich text editing interface in a browser. Unfortunately nobody used it because they stuck with 10.4 Server as the core OS in 10.5 Server was riddled with regressions (I've heard 10.6 Server is a brand new day)

I had an app that needed to take snapshots of web pages, and the client was very picky about the image quality. OSX exposes WebKit in such a way that I could get very nice snapshots, and I could never get anything close on Linux so a mac was the tool of choice. It sat there doing absolutely nothing besides running a web service that would occasionally take a pic of a web page and hand it back to the real linux server, and it did that fine for a long time.

I think the main issue I had was with software update. Apple provides an interactive command line interface to their update program so you could write some scripts to do it but in practise I just did it manually every once in a while. A couple of times it didn't reboot cleanly and got stuck on a firmware update or something so a manual power cycle was in order.

I also had a couple of weird problems where the machine would become unresponsive if it hadn't been rebooted for a long time. Never really got to the bottom of that but it would be something to consider if you were going to use them "seriously".

WebKit is part of Qt and thus available for any platform.

Or did I miss something?

The Qt version (and Chrome's version) uses the platform to do the font rendering, which on everything but OS X and Windows would be freetype.

If the client wanted Apple's particular font rendering, they'd have to use their version of Webkit. The least-shitty way to do that is to write a Webkit app for OS X (there's also the Windows version of Safari, but that would involve a lot of bullshit)

Yep, that's exactly it.

Didn't even have to write an app - I used this excellent tool: http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/

Undoubtedly it was I who missed something! It just came down to "well, I have a working script right here for mac, or I can spend the next days/weeks/maybe never trying to get it working and looking nice on linux".

I guess people don't hear "we went with the mac to save money" too often but in this case, that's what it was.

But even so - I generally don't much like linux's font rendering. Doing it on mac meant that the images looked beautiful, basically exactly like Safari, which was to the client's (and my) taste.

I'm probably going to rig up a colocated Mac Mini to do exactly the same thing. I asked around on Twitter if other people were interested in chipping in to share the service and people were keen.

There's a business opportunity here. The existing screenshot services are mostly slow (I want my imgs within a minute, ideally - not 10+), hideous quality or use browsers on operating systems with shoddy rendering.

As it is, I think I can max out a Mac Mini to producing around 500-700k screenshots a day and lease a Mac Mini with the required hosting for ~$130 a month, so the costs divide down quite nicely.

There's a business opportunity here.

You reckon? I have to admit I didn't even think of that. I wouldn't have thought people would pay for screenshots, but then again I didn't think people would pay to send emails, either. This was part of a value added service, sadly it never really got off the ground.

Shall I send you an email telling you more about what was envisaged? Maybe we can cooperate.

Out of curiosity, what's wrong with the included Apache?

Probably because the rate of fixes to Apple bundled open source software lags behind the official source by a more than he is willing to wait. The version of apache on my 10.6 is 2.2.13 while the official version is 2.2.14(released 10-2009) which introduces bug and security fixes.

To be clear, these Mac Minis are running regular OS X, not OS X Server. I bought one of these back when they first started, using PPC Mac Minis, and everything was as advertised. My motivation at the time was basically just to see if there were any major advantages to using OS X on the server, over Linux (I was using and still use CentOS and Debian on other servers). I didn't really find any such advantages, so after the contract was finished, I had them send me the Mac Mini.

I found it a pain to use, in that file locations etc. are different from both Linux and Solaris; the management apps weren't all that special either - I ended up using the command line to automate things.

I think the main attraction would be for folks that already have a lot of Mac systems.

I have direct experience right now - from a management POV, it's like the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser in HHGTTG - it create an operating system almost but not quite entirely unlike Linux. The costs involved in working out why tool X isn't compiling as expected far outweigh the benefits of the cheap hardware. The sooner I get this system migrated off these damn boxes the better...

I completely forgot about these guys but I think they have been doing this for a while. I can think of a number of reasons you might want to do this and one of those would be to use the Apple HTTP video streaming software that was released last year.

It is also interesting that GoDaddy just released OSX hosting although at a higher cost using XServe boxes and Parrallels. http://www.godaddy.com/hosting/mac-hosting.aspx

They also regularly post "The State of the Mac Mini" with details and opinion on hardware refreshes. Their last one is here: http://www.macminicolo.net/state2009.html

I've had my Mac through these folks for a while; I was unwilling to give up the idea of owning the gear (so VPSes were out) and was pretty happy with the thing in general. I run Linux on it.

The bandwidth pricing is extremely expensive -- for comparison, I pay $60/mo for a VM with 1500GB/mo transfer, yet they'd ask $250/mo just for bandwidth charges for 1000GB/mo.

I'm looking into getting a Mac Mini for some screenshot production and iWeb is offering them with 1500GB for ~$120 a month. That includes the actual machine though, so isn't colo exactly.

Thanks, that looks much better -- they do colo too, and with a year contract they appear to offer for $44/mo what macminicolo wants $155/mo for. (500G transfer.)

Does anyone know if Linux on the Mac Mini can address 8GB RAM? (I know it didn't work on versions of OS X pre-Snow Leopard, so I'm wondering if there's some incompatible special sauce that makes it work there, rather than something simple like turning PAE on.)

ECC memory is a must for server applications, and Mac Minis--including the "server" model--do not come with or support ECC memory.

http://cr.yp.to/hardware/ecc.html

What is the advantage over a VPS?

Are you referring to VPS vs. colocation or Linux VPS vs. Mac OS X Mac Mini? If it's the latter, people would obviously use this if they needed to use Mac OS X Server.

By up-fronting the cost of the hardware, you're going to get many times more CPU and RAM and faster disk I/O than if you were one user of many on a VPS. If you priced out a VPS with 8G of RAM and a dedicated CPU, it would be many hundreds of dollars per month.

Any thoughts on this?

No personal experience, but manybooks.net is a popular (mostly public domain) ebook site that has been running well on macminicolo.net for several years now.

http://manybooks.net/about/

Yeah, in fact it was manybooks that led me to macminicolo. I hadn't seen manybooks until yesterday. Neat site. Nice typography.

I run manybooks.net -- only have good things to say about macminicolo; they're responsive to tech queries, have decent pricing in my experience (and have been very good about switching my plan when bandwidth usage spiked), and I haven't noticed any bottlenecks in their setup. They're also notable, in my experience, for not CAUSING any trouble with my server or the network itself.

I (well, those of us behind Mobile Colloquy, not just me) briefly considered having a colo'd Mac Mini a few months back. It was either with macminicolo or at a datacenter near where one of us lived (NYC area, LA area and SFish area, so decent variety, even if the focus of our search was on LA or SF).

For our purposes, the datacenters that we looked at[1] wound up costing about the same as it would have to host with macminicolo. With macminicolo, bandwidth is expensive, while other places charge for the space on the rack and have much (3-4x) more bandwidth.

It ended up being a lot more then it would cost to get a VPS or two (or even renting a cheapish, non-colo'd, dedicated server somewhere). So, unless you absolutely need a Mac server[2], I don't really think its worth it.

[1] Can't remember where exactly we looked. I'll dig through my emails and see if I can find any information.

[2] There are definitely some valid reasons for having a Mac Server. Stuff like Golden%Braeburn, http://golden-braeburn.com, which, I suppose wouldn't need much bandwidth.

Cool idea but a rather expensive way to go (if you consider hardware + colocation fee) compared with a VPS. Although the mac mini is dedicated its laptop parts make it on par or worse than a good VPS performance-wise.

Id be more inclined to use a mac mini as a server on a local network as opposed to colocating. Another interesting application is a cluster of mac minis-that a whole other area.

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