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Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

They used to sell racks. Incidentally a lot of people buy mac minis for a homeserver utilizing the thunderbolt for a DAS. I believe this is still the only “first party” way to use a remote server for time machine backups. People seem to complain about headaches trying to get it to work over samba with linux servers but apple lets you specify another mac end point for time machine cleanly in their gui.

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I do this (use a mini for hosting time machine backups). I have them on external drives, I have two and switch between them weekly, keeping the other one at a friend's house.

> People seem to complain about headaches trying to get it to work over samba with linux servers

A long time ago, when I had a bunch of 68k Macs, I had an AppleShare server running Debian. I even served MP3 files to iTunes using a DAAP service. At some point I set up a Time Machine system for the newer machines - the trick was to broadcast a specific machine type so that the Macs would recognise it.

Apple still sells Mac Pros in rack mountable form factor.

They also sold rack mountable Mac servers known as Xserves for nearly a decade...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xserve

Okay, shall we start a new meme about "The Year of macOS in the Data Center (2010)"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server#Discontinuatio...

It appears that Apple ensures that enterprise/server use cases remain safe, legal, and rare. My estimates of zero rackmounts and zero servers was an exaggeration, but I'm curious if the comparative percentage rises beyond a single digit.

I must confess: I yearn for the days when AppleTalk was an absolutely amazing peer-to-peer networking solution, and when it ran rings around anyone trying to cobble together an ad hoc 10Base2 LAN in their office.

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