This week the Mac mini turned 7 years. Steve introduced this at MacWorld in San Fransisco.

The quote he started with was “Why doesn’t Apple offer a stripped down Mac that is more affordable” and he said “I wish I had a nickel for every time somebody asked me that.”

The mini has evolved greatly since that day. I think it was intended as a cheap desktop replacement to help switchers but has now evolved to be used as a capable server for small and medium sized companies. There are even many companies that use it as there internet presence (I know as I helped a few of them setting it up). Read this blog post at the Macminiolo blog for the increase in performance in these 7 years.

The mini is used for many things, as embedded computer, media player, in-car entertainment system and many more. Just try some google queries. This one is awesome, only not for home use: a 48U rack enclosure to hold 140 mini’s.

The predecessor of this site switch.richard5.net was started a little later as my first Mac mini was bought a few months after the introduction with a 23″ Cinema Display. I started using it as my main machine at home after long exposure to Linux and Windows, it was my first Mac after admiring them from a distance.

I’ve since bought five mini’s and still have 3. A G4 for testing PowerPC Leopard installs, an intel one for testing Snow Leapard and Lion and the last one is located at Macminicolo.net and serving amongst others this site. My current main desktop is an 27″iMac and for sentimental reasons I recently even bought a PowerMac G5. I loved the case and this one was without a scratch, additional this was the first model that was sold using water-cooled CPU’s.

This weekend I’m moving all my sites and email to a newer mini again at macminicolo, as they rock (for real). My older production mini was a core duo Intel one which was still running Leopard (could not find the courage to upgrade with no backup machine available). Getting a newer machine (a 2 year old Core 2 Duo) also meant I could upgrade to Lion. I’ve installed the new machine from scratch and I’m currently moving site for site and email per domain to make sure that everything goes seamless for the end users.

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…

Another update after the redesign, as I needed to rewrite some of the instructions due to the effect of the changes in MySQL 5.5.x and the relocation of the installed software to /usr/local/ I’ve decided to restructure the content of the site a bit. Don’t worry all existing stuff will stay where it is with comments and all. So I’ve started rewriting the installation instructions for all the software on Snow Leopard first. It isn’t finished yet but you can have a look already, not much has changed but i’ve read it again, tweaked the text a bit and changed the compiling options of course to facilitate the relocation of the installed components. When everything is finished I will put notices on all pages to redirect everybody to the latest instructions.

You can have a preview of the MAMP setup and the mail server instructions.

When this all is finished I will start rewriting the Leopard instructions and will keep including the PowerPC instructions. To help me test the 64 bits instruction, which wasn’t possible on my old G4 mini, I’ve become the proud owner of a PowerMac G5 2,5 GHz dual processor unit. It’s a beauty in almost mint condition. I always wanted one of these aluminum “cheese graters” and got the opportunity to buy this one for a nice price. I really like this model as this is the first consumer computer that came with water-cooled processors. It’s nice to own a bit of computing history that looks this nice.

The former design was already from 2008 and it was time for a refresh. I was trying for a more cleaner look with a more minimal design. Less is more… I also worked on the readability of the site. As people are getting more pixels on their screen it was time to make more use of it and I’ve made the design a bit wider to accommodate the use of bigger fonts. I also included a new plugin which should help in the readability of the code and scripts. It should also help in prevent in some of the errors that happened to some when copying and pasting the scripts directly to an editor or the Terminal. To preview the effect of the new plugin look at Compiling Apache in 32 bits mode on Snow Leopard. Drawback is that I need to make changes to all the rest of existing pages to make use of the plugin so bear with me. if you have any remarks please let me know, improvements are always welcome!

I’m working as well on a new rewrite of the instructions to accommodate the changes that were introduced by MySQL 5.5 but it takes some time. I’m also working on relocating the postfix stuff to have the compiled version in a different location than the original version to make sure we don’t get interference from Apple’s updates. I’m still having doubts on creating a specific direcotry for averything called /usr/local/diymacserver/ or just use /usr/local/. Let me hear your thoughts!

Some additional history and perspective: It’s almost 4 years ago I’ve started this particular blog and 6 years since switch.richard5.net (which still generates a lot of traffic). The current site has 250 posts and 150 pages with documentation which will be expanded greatly during the summer when Lion will be released.

I’ve always looked at the XServe in awe. They where the most beautiful designed rack servers I had ever seen, and not only on the outside. I dreamed of once owning my own, but alas hat i not going to happen anymore. Apple just announced that they are discontinuing the model. Everybody wanting to run a server will have to choose a Mac Pro or Mini for running OS X server.

I think it’s a pity that this is happening, I hope this does not mean that in a few years we won’t have a OS X server version. As that is still the best solution for running an OS X server. I’m only showing the cheap alternative here.