Comments on: Intel MacMinis – The OS X Blade Server

By: Network Jack » Blog Archive » Ubuntu/Debian on an Intel MacMini

Network Jack » Blog Archive » Ubuntu/Debian on an Intel MacMini — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 04:57:56 +0000

[...] Bointon hinted as much in comment #6 to my original article and so when the Debian Mini developed problems communication over that [...]

By: John Russell

John Russell — Tue, 29 May 2007 04:38:56 +0000

I’ve found Mini’s perfect for this ‘blade’ type application. I’m devastated to learn at appleinsider.com that they may be discontinued. It may be worth forming a group to lobby Apple for something that fits this niche. jbr at onlywebdata dot com.

By: Brian Blood

Brian Blood — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 19:24:44 +0000

Dave, The hard part about doing anything inside a MacMini is getting the case apart. After that, most operations are pretty simple as long as you are very careful. If you are unsure about it, it's worth taking it to your local Apple Store to have them replace the drive. Brian

By: Dave Rutledge

Dave Rutledge — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 17:15:35 +0000

I’m not a hardware guy at all. But the replacement of the mini drive with the Hitachi drive interests me since my original drive just died after 3 months 24×7. Can anyone tell me if this replacement is an easy job for a local semi-Apple support person to do? Is it a quick operation? Thanks . . .

By: Network Jack » Blog Archive » Intel MacMini Blade Server Followup

Network Jack » Blog Archive » Intel MacMini Blade Server Followup — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 23:09:32 +0000

[...] MacMini Blade Server Followup A followup to my article that generated a lot of traffic and [...]

By: Dave Russo

Dave Russo — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:29:05 +0000

Mainly for Scott Schmitz..
We’re using an old G4 Xserve that’s going to have to be reformated due to some OSX Server software problems (Intermittent reboots).
In the meantime we’re going to use a MINI while the production machine is down.

Any problems using Tenon iTools? Also any tips/tricks on moving the data over?

Thanks..
Feel free to use my email
drusso@cat2.com

By: Brian Blood

Brian Blood — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:34:10 +0000

Davis, We haven't experienced any cooling problems whatsoever. The Minis put out so little heat themselves. Mainly because they use external power supplies. Equinix uses centralized A/C with sector based control and N+1 redundancy. Brian

By: Davis

Davis — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 15:21:19 +0000

Hello Brian,

What sort of cooling problems have you run into with the MacMini setup? Is your datacenter cooled with one large central A/C unit, or is each rack cooled individually?

Thanks,
davis

By: Marcus Bointon

Marcus Bointon — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 14:39:26 +0000

We run a big web app on a cluster of Minis running Ubuntu, but we’ve run into a very nasty problem that’s only just been fixed. There appears to be a hardware bug in the ethernet flow control, and it can completely hang up the machine. There are two workarounds – there is a kernel that disables flow control altogether for the Marvell Yukon2 chipset the mini uses, and there’s a mechanism for spotting that the problem is about to occur and forcing the ethernet PHY to renegotiate its connect speed, which avoids the total hang up but takes the machine offline for a few seconds. More info here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/netdev@vger.kernel.org/msg30907.html
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/2/1/307

Aside from this problem, the minis really rock; so fast but with so little power consumption.

We tried running with the system on a fast 3.5″ SATA drive mounted over firewire, but it didn’t really help much, so we went back to internal drives.

By: Brian Blood

Brian Blood — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 21:52:53 +0000

Scott,

We found the issues with using persistent connections in MySQL as well and turned them off.

Please note that this particular architecture we built for this client is not a standalone server as your comment makes your situation sound like.

I’m hoping you have proper redundancy/failover/backups for your system.

As your situation grows, you will need have some way of scaling out your front-end servers. It also looks like (based on what I read on your site), you will need SSL termination once you reach a certain level of SSL based traffic.

Brian