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In Reply to: RE: I plan to run LMS on my headless Mac Mini... posted by Rod M on May 07, 2017 at 07:30:18
I thought the Asylum was running off a Dell server, or was that mainly for the database? I'm kind of curious to know what the Asylum is comprised of today.
Follow Ups:
Yes, we ran Dell servers for years moving up from a 1950, 2450 to 2850s and an R710. Over time, it became apparent that power costs were our largest expense. A buddy of mine had moved all of his sites to Mac Vault and was blown away with the performance and cost, so we looked into it and decided to move in that direction.
Now, the whole server farm uses less power than one Dell server. My only complaint is Apple's version of BSD is a bit mangled causing me to call Munix and when you do updates, they tend to break like changing apps to default ports blowing away your changes.
On the upside, running on SSDs has improved performance for some apps.
-Rod
Interesting. I'm not clear on what MUNIX is. I found something on it in German. Are you not running straight MacOs / OS X ?Coming off SGI IRIX & Sun Solaris, Mac OS X (BSD) was a little different for me mainly with location of files and startup scripts but the underlying commands and utilities are mostly all there including man pages and my favorite vi editor.
Yes, Mac mini is very power efficient. I believe my older unit draws about 8 watts or so idle and no more than about 12 to 15 watts playing music. Of course for server duty yours are probably using more power.
Edits: 05/08/17
Munix => Mangled Unix, it's my acronym.
We're running a standard MacOS and it's got most everything you'd want. The primary issues are config files versus Apple's plist which is mostly annoying for figuring out how to do little things like changing default ports. Then, installing packages and finding them can be a challenge. It took a while to get them configured to be compatible with out FreeBSD configurations. Updates are a nightmare as Apple tends to break everything for what we're using them for. Despite their quirks, it's been a good move.
Power usage is stellar. We use only about 100 watts for 5 Minis with 16GB, 512GB SSD and 1TB HD plus a router and Dataprobe which gives us auto-ping checking and remote reboots.
-Rod
I was wondering why my Google search on MUNIX was turning up some weird results. ;-)I recall having to chase down a plist directory and XML file for something I needed to modify. Fortunately I haven't had to mess around in this area very much as I'm not that familiar.
That DataProbe seems like a useful tool.
Many years ago I used cron and a cronjob to launch a script which pinged the network and sent a report each morning to my pager - this was before smartphones. The script used Mail (sendmail) to send text to my pager number on basic network health. I could view ping results. If I didn't get that pager text at all, the network was probably down. Not very sophisticated but it worked.
You can set the Mac to reboot at a certain time each day or each week if you find that helpful, but it goes against the idea of uptime. Some UNIX based systems run for years without a reboot. I think the settings are under System Preferences > Energy Saver > Schedule.
Thanks for sharing.
Edits: 05/08/17
Yeah, the DataProbe is sweet. It's basically a smart power strip with a web GUI and somewhat cryptic terminal type setup for email address and basic stuff. Mine supports 8 power outlets. Once set up, it just works. Compared to having to drive down to the data center and wander around miles of server racks to find ours, it's a miracle worker!
The Minis are actually quite stable. While the old FreeBSD systems could run literally for years without a restart, the Minis are close. In the two years that we've had them, I may have had to hard boot the main web server 2 or 3 times. The others with less load just keep on ticking.
-Rod
Unless, of course, the Minis are running some version of Windows. ;-)
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