Turn your Mac mini into your ISP

At one point, our server died, and I replaced it with a mini-mac I had. I loaded OSX 10.3, and went to town. This thing rocked. It worked great, I used an external drive, not trusting the internal one (it is a laptop drive after all), and because the internal one is sloooow (5400rpm). It worked fine for the 6 weeks we used it, never a crash, never a problem. Not as fast as our X-serve that replaced it, but it's not fair to compare a duel G5 with a G4. In any event, I even had a 9" LCD touch screen on top of it for use in the server room. The little monitor was just to scale for the CPU, and the touch screen solve the issue of where to put a mouse in a server room. It ran my buisness, e-mail and everything else just fine. I now keep one as an emergancy machine in case our new server goes out. For $500, you may be a little slow, but we would still be live. -GReg

Also keep in mind that many, if not all, ISPs forbid home users from running a server of any kind. If you want to do this and serve a lot of traffic on your network you may end up having to upgrade your service agreement at considerable expense.

It was far, far easier for me to install and configure Fedora on my mini to accomplish the same thing.

We setup a mini to host a small division of one of our companies in house, including housing remote users -- I'll say this, at the time of Panther, it was a nightmare. It wasn't able to deal with much of our multiple user home folders and remote login -- adding users would become corrupt on occassion. The mini itself would start to flake out on mail/web services, and we'd frequently have to restart it remotely. Finally, tired of it, we thought we built it improperly (since it doesn' take to OS server natively) -- so we wiped it clean and rebuilt it -- same issues. Tiger server may have fixed some of the bugs, and I'm sure for home usage it's probably nice -- but for office setting on panther, it was hell, and not stable.