Mac Server setup

[Ditchmiester]

Lets just start with this. I have a small knowledge of Mac experience.

I have been enlisted to fix my friends Mac setup. She has a 17" MacBook Pro with a 500 gb hard drive. Her hard drive is full and she has a very large picture, movie and music library. From the research I have done I'm going to buy Mac mini with the server addition and use it as a home server. This has 2TB of storage plus is expandable easily.

My question is; is there a good tutorial out there for setting up the server side of it? Just to make sure I do everything right.

Thanks

 

[WYLDGFI]

Im sure there is but honestly, setting up mac sharing isnt too much of an issue. With Mountain Lion alone its pretty simple to share items. Could always go with something simpler like a NAS and the wireless networking unless she wants the additional computer setup to do other things.

 

[Ditchmiester]

Okay thanks. Yeah she likes the idea of being able to use the "desktop" as a computer in her office if she needs to.

 

[cgsigns_jamie]

If all she needs is more storage you'd be better off just getting a NAS or external RAID array. Especially if all this is only for one user. No real need for a server when you simply need more storage.

I run an XServe and OS X Server. I'm still back on 10.6 because 10.7 and 10.8 are a joke. Apple REMOVED essential services and tried to oversimplify the whole idea of a server.

You'd be better off running any distrobution of Linux if you're starting from scratch (this is coming from me, a die hard Mac user)

So as much as I love Macs I'd suggest you think again before investing in their server platform.

 

[WYLDGFI]

Okay thanks. Yeah she likes the idea of being able to use the "desktop" as a computer in her office if she needs to.

If she likes the idea of being able to use it as an office computer....just go with standard Mountain Lion. It has media streaming and sharing and its quite easy to set up between 2 macs.

 

[MikePro]

aye, sharing on a mac is easy.
heck, you don't even need the server setup if you're only storing files for a few computers to access. a plain ole' mac mini can house the files just the same and be accessible to any registered users on your home network.

even less-expensive route:
there's also wireless routers that have a usb input that you can hookup an external hard drive to, and serve files to the network that way.

 

[Typestries]

I'm gonna dumb it down even more, with the interest of your friend getting a bigger bonus with very little extra work.

Buy a used mac mini on ebay. A g4 will work, under $80 but an older intel dual processor machine would be better you can find them sub $200 as you'll get wifi which makes the next steps easier.....

then buy two 2tb external drives.

Put the mini and drives somewhere out of the way. install snow leopard on the mini it's all you'll need for that. Hook up the 2 drives. One of them gets her media collection. The second becomes her time machine backup drive. Turn on file sharing.

Now, here's the bonus of this setup. Once setup, that just sits there. Minis use 16w or so, and the 2 drives maybe 30w, so this is lower power consumption setup.


She can now stream her media to ANY PC in the house, her TV if it's newer, an apple TV, ipad, ipod, or iphone. PLUS, she gets to keep the macbook, and still can access that entire media collection effortlessly (you could still get her a new machine and do the same thing). And, every device she has, including her iphone, can seamlessly back up to the time machine drive on the mini.

Even if you go your route, dont bother with the server edition. I even have a media server setup running on an old G4 mac mini running 10.5.6, It works just fine.