Not to long ago I wrote here about our trusty mac mini server, well after nearly two years (20 months) of service the old Mac mini has moved on. No it did not die, it is now enjoying a second life as a desktop once again. After a little debate as to whether or not to purchase an Xserve I once again decided to go with a mini as my server (long story short it was the noise factor that tilted the scales the most). The new mini being a dual core box with 2 GB of ram is much faster the the old mini, but serves the same purposes. The old mini is now happily functioning as a desktop again as I have passed it on to my mother. Mom has really taken to iPhoto, and the rest of the iLife suite. Now that digital photos are so easy she keeps wondering when we’ll be adding a grandbaby to the equation.

So for the geeks out there you’re probably wondering was it easy to upgrade. In a word, yes. The Mac comes with a program that helps you migrate, I of course didn’t try it. Long story short it was as easy as copying from one drive to another, to move users data. Email was a bit harder. For email I copied from the old server to the new server using an IMAP client. The documentation on upgrading email servers could be much better. Long story short, the database backups I have been making would not work completely with the new server, unless I wanted to lose the metadata associated with about 10,000 emails (including whether or not they had been read). I believe it’s an endianess problem (PowerPC to Intel migration). Enough said.

So again these Mac mini’s are great, you can even use them as an extremely quite server. UNIX server that is.