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Comment by LordKeren | Hacker News Reader

I can’t help but wish that Apple would provide the handful of features needed to make a Mac mini into a competent home server.

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Maybe they already have, depending on what you need. Settings >> General >> Sharing provides lots of options. "Remote Login" is SSH and SFTP, and last time I used it, "File Sharing" was SMB. "Screen Sharing" and "Remote Management" seem useful, too. I assume that "Media Sharing" is supposed to allow iTunes on your network to see media files, although I've never used it and the information on the dialog is limited.

Can you run it headless? Like, if I have it power on after a reboot, is it possible to log in remotely?

Yes, but getting it to work requires that you both:

(a) disable FileVault, and (b) enable automatic login

One option is to automatically log in to an account which has very little access, and have everything sensitive on an encrypted disk/partition, and to use a separate keychain for any credentials you want to protect.

This and more suggestions here from a company using Macs as build servers: https://forums.developer.apple.com/forums/thread/737381?answ...

I don't like the idea of enabling automatic login on any machine, so I keep FileVault on and just accept that any rebooted Macs will need physical access on restart.

If it's possible somehow to get screen-sharing access (or even SSH) without automatic login after a reboot, I'm sure lots of users would love to know how.

Yes it supports remote admin via terminal or virtual desktop. I currently use mine like this for transcoding while freeing up my macbook.

My old mini ran just fine only accessing it over remote desktop. I assume the new ones will act the same.

Did your old mini have FileVault enabled?

I don’t think so. It was a x86 that I upgraded to 16gb ram and 1 tb hd.

With ssh, most certainly.

Also, if you enable desktop sharing via VNC, it will also work at the GUI login screen.

You can enable SSH to do this

i’ve found it pretty easy to run my “homelab” with docker compose. Traefik binds to port 80 and 443, and all my apps are accessible behind the proxy.

Docker desktop can be configured to start on login. For keeping the mac awake “forever”, i’d suggest the Amphetamine app.

I also appreciate that you can easily use the macOS screen sharing app to login and manage the mac from a laptop.

That certainly works, but Docker will use a Linux VM, right?

yes, unfortunately. Doesn’t really matter for the web apps i’m hosting, but I could see it being an issue for certain apps/workloads!

I suppose you could try running Asashi Linux in the future? I think it only works on m1 and m2 mac’s at the moment but don’t quote me on that.

Orbstack might improve energy consumption for your setup, they are applying some clever hacks.

Yes unfortunately there’s no Linux that runs on the metal on an M4 yet.

Yes, docker desktop uses a Linux VM to run the containers.

> For keeping the mac awake “forever”, i’d suggest the Amphetamine app.

macOS has a built-in console command for that: `caffeinate` [1]

1. https://ss64.com/mac/caffeinate.html

What specific feature gaps would you like to see them address?

Linux support. MacOS is a desktop first gui based operating system. Linux on the other hand is a server first cli/terminal based operating system. Everything server related is designed to on linux first and foremost and may or may not incidentally also run on MacOS.

macOS is explicitly designed to not be a server, and the consumer hardware it runs on is also designed that way. Apple even discontinued the Server tools that you could buy on the App Store that used to be called Mac OS X Server.

If you want to run Linux server apps, you should run Linux. Because Apple hardware and macOS isn't giving you any advantages over a generic piece of hardware running a Linux distribution. The hardware costs more and is less upgradable than off-the-shelf hardware.

Servers should not run desktop environments because they are a waste of resources and widen the attack surface due to having more components installed and running.

And even if you want a desktop environment for your Linux server, Linux most certainly has a wide selection of mature stable desktop environments.

If you need to do development work or just achieve the goal of running Linux applications on a Mac, that can be easily done via virtual machines, containers, etc.

If they work on a BSD they should work okay on macOS. (Not because macOS is exactly like FreeBSD, just that it means the project has been tested cross-platform.)

run it in a VM.

I'd like to replace my NAS using a mini - but Apple segment the market on disk.

A "dumb" NAS 2.5" SSD drive array plugged into one via ~~firewire~~, and then out to the network via the Mac Mini would work.

edit: thunderbolt!

FireWire?

Once I have some more disposable income I plan to buy a Thunderbolt RAID array and a mini. FireWire hasn’t been on Macs for at least a decade.

Apple’s internal storage pricing is absurd but you wouldn’t plan to use a NUC or a Raspberry Pi SOC’s onboard storage for a NAS anyways.

hah! meant thunderbolt :)

> Thunderbolt RAID array

this is interesting:

https://www.owc.com/solutions/ministack-stx

Official Linux support would help, is anyone running MacOS on a server?

This isn't the market for MacMinis though. Why are people on this forum so bad at understanding market segmentation? Apple made an incredible desktop machine that happens to work pretty damn well as a server if you poke around.

This machine is for people at home to for editing video. It's great in the field for production where it goes from pelican case to hotel desk to folding table to pelican case to cargo hold to storage.

Have you ever thought that maybe people understand "market segmentation", but at the same time, they'd like to know how broad a range of computing options one would have on these general purpose computers, with price tags in the many-hundreds to thousands range?

Sure, but to complain that a Mac, which, come on, at this point is a known quantity for 20 years, doesn't run Linux is just looking to complain. If you want more options there's endless x86 choices, and if you want ARM then demand better from other manufacturers as well. Apple showed its possible, why doesn't Dell come out with something comparable? I'm not a fanboy, I run systems of all stripes, but Macs aren't designed to be servers (even though they operate perfectly well as one) and people need to stop complaining that they aren't.

Oh, and there's Asahi, which does run on Macs (not the M4 yet, but it'll come).

In the past, Apple sold at least four generations of the Mac mini that included models literally branded as server models. Continued interest in using more recent models as servers is quite reasonable.

If running native ports of server software isn't your cup of tea, you can run Linux containers on macos.

In the full GUI MacOS install? And the Linux container (I’m assuming you mean container like docker or podman?) would run in a Linux VM?

I run full multiple Ubuntu desktop VMs on Parallels on a M1 MacBook Air. You can use Docker for server installs, sure, but QEMU also works great on Macs and with Rosetta you can even get pretty damn close to native x86 execution speeds.

they run through virtualization which is clunky to interface with across boundaries and introduces overhead. I also don't think it has any hardware acceleration for things that would benefit from using the gpu.

I have a Mac mini backed by an Areca 24-bay Thunderbolt disk-array in the rack in the garage. Works like a dream.

Sorry not knowledgeable about this but do you use this as NAS? What software do you use?

MacOS has built-in file sharing via SMB. It also has built-in VNC for graphically administering the server, built-in ssh/sftp, built-in rsync for backup, etc. etc.

Basically I just use the OS.

I see thank you. I dream to setup something like iCloud but with open source software and hosted at home :) Not sure if there is anything like that out there.

nextcloud.com comes to mind.

Is that something that can be setup on Mac OS? Or do I need to install Linux on Mac Mini?

I’ve never tried turning a Mac into a home server. What features do you need that it’s missing?

Depends what 'home server' means.

MacOS would need syncookies to be a viable tcp server on public IPs, IMHO, but MacOS pulled FreeBSD's TCP stack a couple months before syncookies were added, and they never rebased or otherwise added syncookies later.

I haven't looked into if they pulled any scalability updates over the years, but I kind of assume they haven't, and the stack would have a lot of lock contention if you had more than say 10,000 tcp sockets.

Given that, if I were Apple compatible, I might run a mini as a LAN server, but my home servers provide services for the LAN as well as some public services (of limited value and usefulness, but still public).

The network stack is very different now - BSD doesn't run on cell phones after all. But no syncookies, no.

But IMO the real advantage of ARMv8 for a server is that it has better security.

I don't really think ARMv8 has anything useful to provide here?

It's all in there, it's just optional.

Plus it doesn't have variable length instructions.

I'm still not entirely sure what the security improvements are?

Perhaps they would be good execution nodes if not good endpoints.

Is this something that you can fix by putting the server behind Cloudflare? I assume most "home server" users would do that (or a similar service provided by Apple if they go down that route).

Well, Cloudflare is kind of spendy if you want them to proxy non-http traffic.

If you put a proxy in front, and you're careful to only allow inbound connections from the proxy, you should be ok though.

Funny, I've been using Mac Minis as servers for more than a decade.

What would those be?

Such as?

what else do you need?

What I look for is, 128GB RAM minimum, decent number of PCIe lanes because I want two fast NVMe drives, a HBA card ( though this I guess could be external ), two network ports minimum, ZFS, sane terminal, native support for containers and VMs. Native support for UPS interfacing, native support for backup of containers and VMs. And lastly a community of other users doing the same.

Dual power supplies is a nice to have.

So you are sad that the Mac mini isn't a bog standard HPE/Dell/etc Server?

Boy will you be pissed when you find out about laptops, phones, game consoles and basically every other compute form factor.

Might want to look into rackable Mac Pros though!

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