If you are reading this you are looking at the new mini running Lion!

Why not buy the latest hardware you might ask, because it cost a lot more then a second hand and I really don’t need the power of it. All the sites and mail running on my mini are not giving it a real hard time. If I got slasdotted/fireballed I’ve got WordPress tuned with caching and could handle some load. The highest I got was 10.000 page views in a day, no sweat…

Currently I’ve got rsync scripts which copy my mail, web, database and /etc to an external disk. Thinking that I can rebuild a new mini in a few hours, I got a spare at home (which still would need a rebuild) and can change DNS entries quit quickly to make the change transparent for users. But this requires for my server to be online. I’ve used Amazon S3 earlier for backup earlier with a specific rsync script that copied everything over to Amazon. But somehow never got to that….

What is your solution for handling outages?

Here is nice one for the people wh recently bought a mini, someone found out that it will take 8 Gb of usable memory just like the newer MBP’s. It’s a shame that it still soooo expensive but it is a good thing to look forward to. I’m almost temped to by another mini just to see how this would perform. I think it would make a awesome server, although I must confess that of my current production server only half of it’s 1Gb is in active use.

For people looking to host a server at MacMiniColo.net, they have some second hand mini’s listed on the sign up page which will do the job perfectly for less money. I did this myself as well and it is stil working. I like their service so much I recently renewed for a two year period.

Back to testing…

Update: Forgot to mention that I’ve finished installing everything on a clean install of Snow Leopard. So that now works as it is supposed to do. Next up getting my mini ready for the update and installing everything in 32 bits.

I got the mini a brand spanking new WD Scorpio Blue 320 Gb for 79 euro, it had the most bang for the money. I had to look for the putty knife because it has been a while since I opened up my Intel mini for a faster HD. Installing it was as simple as always and I was finished within 30 minutes. I’m now installing everything fresh, starting with Tiger to be able to test the new Dovecot instructions on Tiger for the people with the older G4 machines who can’t support Leopard yet. Please remember that after Snow Leopard Tiger support will be officially dropped. (which does not mean you won’t get any help but I won’t be testing everything in advanced and I will only assist in trouble shooting). when that is done I will install Leopard on a different partition (plenty of room on the new HD!) to be able to support all the people still using G4 and G5 based Macs.

If you consider that I bought this Mac mini in 2005 and it has been on constantly since a few weeks ago it means that the hard disk has lasted for almost 4 years of continuous use. Not bad for a cosnumer device!

By the way thanks for all the donations in the last few months as you can see your money is being put to good use.

Why do I tell you this, because I paid for the drive partly with some of the money I got from the donations I received from some happy users. As this mini is used to test everything first I thought it was appropriate.

Next target for the donations is getting a new Mac (I hope for a new mini), I need it to be able to support you who want to compile everything in 64 bits mode. My current mini’s don’t support 64 bit. I’ve got one of the early Intel mini’s also paid for partly by donations in September 2006! (Boy does time pass quickly when you have fun)

Currently I can only support Tiger and Leopard on G4 and Intel 32 bits machines. Planning for the future I would like to support 64 bits Intel machines as well. As soon as Snow Leopard comes out the plan is to drop support for Tiger so from then on I will support Leopard on G4/G5 and Intel (32 and 64 bit) and Snow Leopard on Intel (32 and 64 bit).

I hope you agree with this decision as it is impossible to support every combination. I know some of you still use Tiger on older Macs and are unable to upgrade. Please know that I’ll try to help you to the best of my ability even if you are not using one of the supported combinations.

The first thing I tried, now I’ve got everything migrated, was getting my home server to work as a backup MX server. I found out that it was pretty straightforward and adding one line to the main configuration made it work.

I’ve added it to the documentation set, so if you have the same luxury as I have and have more than one server connected you could use the this as well. Read how to do it here: Configuring a backup (relay) MX server.

Maybe it is an idea to start a new donation round for one if people are interested in the results ?

Update: It looks like Apache was already found running on the Apple TV !