Flashes of Panic

This afternoon, our first capital investment arrived at my apartment: a development server in the shape of a Mac Mini. I’ll do some initial configuration using the keyboard, monitor and mouse I use in my office with the laptop, then it will get an ethernet cable to the router and live as a headless server next to the cable modem.

I bought the bare minimum configuration, which explains its remarkable 27-hour turnaround from order to delivery. I figured if it ever turned out to be under-endowed in terms of RAM or disk space, we could probably manage an upgrade.

Then I thought about the specs of this little box relative to the old Qube 3, circa 2000 or 2001, which was the office server at my old job. The Qube did a lot of work for us, functioning as mail server, gateway, firewall, DHCP server, sometimes router, and sometimes web server. And yet…

And that’s leaving out the physical size; the Qube had about the same footprint as a Mini, but the Mini is about 40% of the Qube’s height, and much, much quieter.

And for now, at least, all we’ll be asking of it is SVN and some light web serving. Maybe someday it will become an Xgrid master or someone’s desktop, or maybe we’ll just chain Firewire disks on it and make it a file server. Not bad for such a little box.

(Hey, did I mention this before, or what?)

(Update, an hour later: No way this thing is going to seduce me away from my MacBook; it’s 2 GHz with 2GB RAM vs. 1.66 GHz with a quarter of the RAM, and just doing a command-line install of Ruby you can see the difference. As a multi-core machine, if Apache is built with thread support this sucker is born to be a server.)

Now Playing: Tomorrow from Demolition by Ryan Adams

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