Lab Notes

There's a new web site devoted to the Mac Mini. At MacWorld Expo last week I had more than a few Mac network administrators tell me that they were ordering multiple Mac Minis to use as servers. Bump up the stock memory configuration, and a 1.25 GHz G4 machine can be a pretty effective mail, RADIUS (of course!), DNS, DHCP, et. al. server. We've got an old 400 MHz G4 here that functions as our primary server, and performs all of the above functions as well as being our bug tracking and source code control server — and it's plenty fast.

A shelf full of Mac Minis is a good intermediate step until (if and when) Apple decides to create XServe blades. It's also a great way to ensure continuity of service if one of your servers gets hacked. If you keep your web, email, and DNS servers on separate machines, if one goes down, the others stay up. And given the inexpensive price of the Mac Mini, it's not unreasonable to buy a couple of extras and keep the around for quick swaps in case of a hack or hardware failure.