Unexpected Upgrade

My office has been running a lot of things on some pretty old hardware for a while now. Things are running, but there is a limit to what you can expect two decade old hardware to do for you. I recently had a hard drive crash on an iMac G3 that I had been using for CVS access and a little database and web server work, and I decided rather than rebuild the G3, I'd upgrade the drive in an older Mac Mini I had, and install Snow Leopard on it and use it for the server work in my home office.

I decided to use the same name, frosty, so I didn't have to change a lot in my other machine configs, and put on it all the services that I had on the G3 - with the addition of a few Snow Leopard bonuses - like TimeMachine and DropBox. With these changes, I won't have to worry about the backups for the CVSROOT or the Git repos, or any of the other data I've not got on this server. That is a very nice feeling.

Wonderfully Useful

I've been able to get CVSweb as well as Gitosis going on frosty, and WebDAV wasn't nearly as had on Snow Lepoard as it was on 10.3. I was able to get PostgreSQL support in the Apple PHP install easily, and also PostgreSQL itself.

Sure, it's only got a 1.8GHz Core Duo processor, so it can't run 64-bit apps, but then again, it's only got 2GB of RAM, and that's fixed, so I'm not really sure I need to worry about 64-bit apps for this guy. If I do find that I need 64-bit app support on the server, I'm just going to have to upgrade it to a newer Mac Mini, or maybe just a Mac Pro.

I have managed to make frosty very useful in a very short amount of time. While it's got limitations, I think it's a wonderful little box, and more than a match for the tasks that used to run on a G3.

What's been happening lately

[12/11/2009] I got it all built and put a home page on this bad boy. Just like the others - simple, clean, but more than an Apache error message or a directory listing.