This morning I found that my mail server was down, as was the web server, and in fact everything that my Fedora Linux box does. (The one that I just fought with the CPU fan issue that I mentioned in this post.) It's now complaining that something is wrong with the power supply - a line that should be +5V is only +4.89 or something to that effect. Oh joy, oh rapture. Now in theory I'm supposed to be shutting down my standalone Windows box, and I could scavenge the power supply from that. But I need Karin to review her files and she's visiting her parents, so that won't happen for at least a couple of weeks. And within the last couple of months it's begun to exhibit the classic "Oops, Fedora Core 5 isn't getting all the updates anymore is it?" behavior that means it's not long until I'm forced to update the OS. So I pulled the trigger I've been threatening to pull and bought a Mac Mini. This Mac Mini will be my main file server (TinyGod can't fulfill that role because I reboot TinyGod into Windows sometimes.), my web server, and my mail server. I looked, and I have about 100 Gig of files on my linux box, so I sprang for the biggest drive that goes into a Mac Mini - a 160 Gig SATA drive. I don't need a separate backup drive for that, I can share the drive I use for my laptop.
This shouldn't really impact anybody in any meaningful way, there might be some brief outage when I flip the switch, but I doubt it will take very long. I already known how to run Apache on OS X, and I doubt setting up mail will take much longer. (Although . . . MOVING my IMAP mailboxes may be more complicated. Hmmm.)
For the curious, I bought the low-end Mini, but bumped up the drive space from 60 Gig to 160. This does mean that it won't have a DVD burner (the low end has a "Combo drive" which is a CD burner and DVD-ROM), but seeing as both of my other Macs have DVD burning I think I can live with it. I bought 2Gig of RAM for it from a 3rd party vendor, because Apple overcharges for RAM - going to 2Gig would have cost $250 from Apple, but only costs $100 from Other World Computing, and I can actually get a rebate by sending the 512 Meg that Apple will ship to OWC. Since it's mainly a server I don't need the extra CPU step-up - it will be a huge boost from the 1.2 Ghz Athlon that the linux box has anyway (the Mini will have a 1.66 Ghz Core Duo).
This also marks the end of the transition from build-my-own PC hardware to Apple. Once I shut down scribe and jester (the linux and Windows boxes respectively), all of my computers will be Apple. I still have plenty of non-Apple peripherals, but all of the main iron will be from Apple. Tasty, tasty Kool-Aid. Of course, that wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for the fact that modern Macs run Windows, but it's still a bit of a milestone.
EDIT 1:38 PDT Turned out about 15 minutes after I posted this the linux box died again. Turned out I did have to cannibalize the power supply from Jester to get Scribe to boot. Jester will just have to sit power-supply-less until the Mac Mini arrives.
technorati tags:Linux, OSX, PC, MacMini
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