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Comment by bombs | Hacker News Reader

There's also the Mac Mini! The missing piece is something more powerful than the Mini, but more efficient than the Pro.

The Mac Mini is highly underrated, btw. That may be neither here nor there, but it's an extremely versatile and relatively inexpensive solution to quite a few non-obvious use cases.

- RAID 1 mirrored and/or RAID 0 striped

- DVR

- To do mega-project: car install as all-purpose media server/center (though I have read that there are kinks in this sort of setup, especially as concerns audio)

- Home security setup / server for video feed

I should disclose that I own more of these little buggers than is probably warranted or advisable.

I've been considering picking up one. I'd like to see a home security/automation thread. Can I ask what you have set up? I'm really interested in a rig that can log entry.

I took most of my initial cues from Alan Graham / BoingBoing, though I will freely admit that I haven't gone as far down the home automation rabbit hole as he has. I should also mention that he's now advocating iPads for home automation (I still prefer Minis for various reasons, especially storage capacity for things like video feed and logging).

Some of these links are practically ancient, but they're where I started, and they are good jumping-off points:

http://macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2004/02/13/home_automation...

http://boingboing.net/2010/06/24/ipad-home-automation.html

Let's be honest: the reason I don't go as far on home automation as he does is a) I'm not really interested in being a power user of some of the home auto features he advocates; b) I am too lazy/occupied to write a custom UI that would theoretically be foolproof enough for guests...let alone myself first thing in the morning before coffee. :)

Dislaimer 2: Alan is very much a kitchen-sink approach kind of guy (as is evident in the pics of his rather ungainly and uber-comprehensive UI), whereas I am a minimalist.

Just curious -- how are you using it?

The Mac Mini is restrained by I/O, not CPU, when providing mail, print and file serving.

I think the missing piece is a Mac Mini with a Light Peak connection for external drives. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_Peak

A Mac Mini with 1-2-3 external drives connected using Light Peak will be more than sufficient for most small companies, and this will be much cheaper than an Xserve with the same amount of redundant disk space.

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