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…

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