JustinBKay.org

Back when the first Mac Mini computers came out I bought one. I couldn't pass up the chance to get OS X on such inexpensive hardware. I previously couldn't justify spending a couple thousand on something that was unproven in my workflow. It was the 1.25Ghz model with 512MB of RAM and a 60 Gig Hard Drive. It worked well and I loved the operating system, but then the next year they came out with the Intel models and I bought one of those for the increased performance. At that point my ppc mini went into semi retirement, it was just too slow for day to day use. That is until this week when I brought it out of retirement to be a server for my home network. I have Qwest DSL and it suffers from slow dns resolving, so I wanted to see if a caching dns server on my network would help (and it did).

I downloaded the Ubuntu 6.06 for ppc server iso and installed it. It installed without incident. I then began loading it with the software that I'd require. So far I have set up nfs for file sharing, bind9 to solve my slow dns blues, ruby 1.86, rails, mongrel, mongrel cluster, and nginx for my Ruby on Rails applications. Works like a charm. I'm very happy with this small quiet server that is perfect for home usage!