Robert Carleton’s story about moving a rack full of older Celeron-based servers to a Mac Mini, using Parallels VM software to host the BSD images of his servers, got me thinking. Robert’s pages, served from a BSD image of his old rack mount servers hosted on a Mac Mini now on his desktop, pop right up: the Mini’s dual 1.66 GHz cores offer performance on a par with his 4 older ~700 MHz Celerons. He notes that there is now a single point of failure, but he’s no longer in the hosting biz, so it’s not a critical issue.
Which got us to thinking about collapsing all of gulker.com’s internal network into our Core Duo Mini. We currently have 6 live computers in the family room (8 processors) on our internal private network (once known as a Class C network), and a bunch of older machines in a rack in the garage. As a learning exercise, we maintain our own internal DNS servers, SAN NAS, print server, mail server and blogging server. The mail server (Linux) and blogging server, Userland Radio on Mac OS X, are now obsolete (Comcast blocks private SMTP servers and Radio is not being developed). So, with a few essential services, and no public-facing servers on the LAN, single-point-of-failure is even less of an issue for us.
For another thing, we don’t have to virtualize a bunch of stuff: our DNS, print and some file servers run on OS X already – we can just move them. I can see leaving the Dual G5 and its fast video card in place as a workstation, the G4 Mini as a secondary workstation (for web browsing, email and the Paperless Project with a backup DNS) and putting Linux and Windows images on the Intel Mini, for times when we need those OSes (the A3 Scanner needs Windows, and Linux is just fun).
Most of the storage on the internal net is now on cheap, big SAN NAS devices, so no issue there. Print sevices can be moved to the SAN NAS, or hosted on a workstation. Road trip in the works, but when I get back, I think everything goes on the Mini. CPU count goes from 8 to 4, and a few hundred pounds of hardware can retire, including our much-loved Cube and AMD 64 box…
As you can see from the legend above [since removed: see Comments below], Spam Karma 2 is working fine, catching all the dreck that I would otherwise be cleaning out of the comments. Question, how does one remove the banner…?
Reader Paul Waite was kind enough to comment, when I complained about mounting comment spam, that he thought Charles Arthur had found a solution for his WordPress blog. As it happens, Charles and I worked for the Independent in London together: Charles edited the Network section, wherein I penned a column.
I left a note on Charles’ blog, and he was kind enough to respond that Spam Karma 2 had made his blogging life vastly easier. We downloaded and installed it this evening: it found 8 spam comments already on the blog that I didn’t know existed, then caught a new incoming porn spam in its first minute on the job. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship…
According to this post on the Parallels Support Forum – VT-X disabled by firmware update?, Mac Minis with firmware MM11.004B.B00 (the version my machine has) show VT-X working and not working. Parallels works OK, but is supposed to really fly with VT-X ‘on.’ Parallels reports mine is not working…
A guy in Hawaii replaced an aging rack of Celeron-based 1U servers with a Mac Mini running BSD in 2 Parallels virtual machines. His machines catch 10,000 accesses or so a week, and his power and air-conditioning bill have dropped considerably. Cool…
Parallels, the Mac OS X virtualization software that lets me run Windows XP on my Mac Mini, is awesome. With only 512 MB RAM (and the OS needs 128 MB for the video with XP installed) performance is perfectly usable. As hoped, the Mustek scanner’s Windows software is a bit less crash prone (albeit wierder) than the Mac OS 9 Color-It package. We managed 9 high-res scans of newsprint pages before it blew up (beyond task manager’s ability to kill). The 2 GB RAM upgrade is in the works…
So, we installed Parallels, virtual machine software for Mactel computers, on our dual-core Mac Mini. Our base configuration (read, 512 KB RAM) actually works! We installed Parallels with 5 or 6 other apps running (not recommended, but it worked), which speaks to the quality of Mac OS X 10.4.x virtual memory (and Parallels connection to same). Quitting all the apps, once we’d realized what we asked our resource-constrained Mini to do, was a bit slow, but patience was rewarded, Apps quit, Parallels installed, we’re good to go.
I’m already to order the 2 GB of matched RAM this machine needs (it may need more, but that’s the current limit for the mini), but it’s interesting to see how much works in 512 MB (I’m dreading the ‘putty-knife-upgrade’). With nothing running on the Mac side, Windows XP on Parallels runs not unlike what I see on my 3-year-old PC (a Thinkpad T41), in its ‘constrained’ RAM, at least for email and browser applications. Judging by the performane of Parallels on my MacBook Pro (1.5 GB RAM), the upgrade will be worth the $200+ for the SIMMs. One issue is that Parallel reports that my expensive Core Duo chip’s virtualization is turned off by firmware (Apple, what’s up with that?) – didn’t see that on the MacBook Pro. We’re researching…
Situated near the storied corner of 18th and Vine in Kansas City, The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum was a must see for my baseball fan spouse. Housed with the American Jazz Museum in an open, modern building, the museum is beautifully done. Exhibits include the recreation of a boarding room – players couldn’t stay in hotels in segregated America – and a large diamond adorned with bronze statues of Negro Leagues greats. Highly recommended…
Lucy, nee Carrott with new husband Dylan Mayor at the Village Presbyterian Church yesterday. Our best wishes for a wonderful life…
Woke up in Kansas City this AM and jogged along Brush Creek, in a neighborhood full of memorials to Civil War battles (at the scene of McGhee’s charge, Confederate Colonel McGhee and Union Captain Johnson fought hand to hand: McGhee was slain, Johnson was wounded).
The hour-and-15 minute flight from Denver took more than 6 hours thanks to thunderstorms. United pilot Pat Sullivan told me you don’t fly into thunderstorms, because you might not fly back out. After a final one-hour holding pattern near Kansas City we made it in, though the plane appeared to have been struck by lightning on the way down. We’re here for family friend Lucy Carrott’s wedding…