Recently I have been looking at ways to reduce energy usage around the house.

One long overdue way was to put my always-on loaded 300w PC Desktop to sleep and migrate its server duties to an always-on Mac Mini, which probably idles around 16w.

Despite all the cool stuff it does, the mini is still stock, 1.86 GHZ with 1GB of RAM. It could probably use a little more RAM for running Boxee, but besides that its fine.

I also located this Mini at my television, so I could use it as a media server as well. This is where a Mac Mini is a better solution than a cheaper, dedicated NAS server. Here are just some notes on what I use the Mini server for, and some gotchas to look out for when staging your own home mini server.

1. A Time Machine server.

My MacBook will backup to the Mini over the network whenever its plugged in, or whenever I tell it to. The Mini itself also backs up via Time Machine to its external hard drive.

2. A PC backup server.

Infuriatingly, Windows 7 has a great backup program built-in, but it will not allow you to use a network drive with a Home version of the OS. Like remote desktop, this is an essential OS service which Microsoft insists on using as a carrot for home users to pay twice as much for Windows 7 Professional.

So, instead, I use a third-party backup software.

3. An iTunes Server.

I could spend a few paragraphs bitching about how difficult iTunes makes managing music for users with multiple computers and devices, but I suspect most users know this already.

Still, its a big plus to have one ‘master’ always-available iTunes library, and drag and drop stuff from it onto my laptop whenever I want to put it on my iPhone, rather than keeping all the data on my laptop.

4. A Boxee server.

I have a love/hate relationship with Boxee. My #1 complaint is that while it does so much, navigation and stability is poor.

The most annoying problem with Boxee is that you cannot customize your home screen. If I could just put shortcuts to my favorite Pandora stations and Hulu Feeds on my home screen, I could cut my navigation on Boxee by 90%.

Which is important, because Boxee navigation is kind of a pain in the butt with a 10-ft setup. There are lots of ways to do it but most of them aren’t that great. Plus, on a 2008 Mini Boxee can be sluggish.

You can use the Boxee remote iPhone app, Mobile Airmouse iPhone app, or a Mac remote to control Boxee. There is a Boxee widget also, which I have installed but not tried yet – I like the idea though.

The problem with using iPhone apps for control is that you need to navigate to and open the app on your iPhone whenever you need to do anything.

The problem with the Mac Remote is that I find it kind of unreliable and it will also control my notebook in the same room. Then there is the conflict with Front Row, which I also use.

Finally, I often check into my Mac Mini to find that Boxee has crashed with a dialog box on the desktop.

On the plus side, Boxee has some nifty features – its Pandora client is great, and I really like the ability to pull up MTV videos when browsing your own music. Hulu integration is klunky but it works.

Also, forget VNC-ing to a box running Boxee in 1080p, performance is horrible.

5. Streaming Media Server

Using Simplify Media, I can stream my iTunes library to my iPhone over the internet. Using StreamToMe, I can stream video as well. Both have some limitations but its great to have.

Simplify Media’s main problem is its constant indexing delays. On their website, they seem to kind of punt this issue off, but its the #1 complaint in the reviews. When they launched their version 2, they really needed this to go away.

There are some pluses to Simplify Media though, like sharing your library with friends and shuffling songs, as well as not requiring port forwarding for internet use.

StreamToMe is a little more straightforward, less feature-packed, less annoying, but also streams video, which is a big plus.

6. General-purpose Network-Attached Storage (NAS)

I like to run SSD’s on my workstations, but obviously they don’t have much storage. with network storage, you don’t really need much local storage.

7. Web/LAMP Server.

I use my MacBook for web development, but am moving this to the Mac Mini.

8. A VNC server. Mac OS comes with a VNC server (aka ‘Screen Sharing‘), but its just non-standard just enough to make a swap out worthwhile. Two of the major issues with the Mac VNC server is that it is not automatically compatible with general-purpose VNC clients. Another is that it is has relatively mediocre performance.

By turning it off and replacing it with OSX VNC-Server (aka Vine Server), you get a faster, more compatible remote access solution. On the other side, try running JollysFastVNC as the client for even more performance (on the PC, I prefer UltraVNC as client).

The downside of this is that Finder will not automatically give you the screen sharing option for a computer running OSX VNC-Server, and I doubt “Back to My Mac” would work. You can get around this by leaving screen sharing as-is and setting up OSX VNC-Server on port 5901.

My main gripe with VNC for remote access in general it that you have to run it at the same resolution as the main display, which is rarely what you want.

For example, since my Mac Mini is connected to an HDTV, its display resolution is 1920×1080. This is a problem when VNC-ing in from my 13″ MacBook, as the display needs to be scaled and is hard to read. It also lowers overall VNC performance.

JollysFastVNC has a nifty feature where you can run a kind of magnifying glass over the parts of the screen you want to use, buts its still awkward.

This is where I really prefer Windows Remote Desktop. When you connect, you can run it at a resolution which makes sense for the client, and it has much better performance – much better than the best VNC setups.

One plus of VNC over Windows Remote Desktop is that it doesnt boot the display to the login screen while you’re connected remotely.

Hooking It All Up

If you are going to hook your Mac Mini up to an HDTV, you are probably going to need some special cables you don’t already own for the best results.

Video Hookup

The Mac Mini is capable of 1080p, but it has a DVI-out, which most HDTVs do not have an input for (but absolutely should).

You can use the DVI-to-VGA converter included with the Mac Mini for connecting to an HDTV’s PC-in port, but for some reason HDTVs can be really picky about what resolutions it lets a VGA-connected device run in. In the case of my Panasonic Viera G10, max resolution is 1400-something. Its usable, but native 1080p just looks so much better.

The answer is a DVI to HDMI adapter. , which works perfectly. In my experience, the Mac Mini will just automatically switch to 1080p with this cable, and looks outstanding.

The downside of connecting DVI to HDMI is that your TV will expect the audio to come through the HDMI port as well. It is very rare for a TV to accommodate an HDMI connector and allow you to associate it with an alternate digital audio source, which is really annoying.

I get around this by using a separate audio input on my receiver, but this is also inconvenient as all of my other TV inputs are completely switchable from the television remote.

Audio Hookup

The Mac Mini and Macbooks have special mini-plugs for digital audio out. This is confusing, as consumers are used to using TOSLink or RCA PCM connectors.

Of course, Apple does not include the special cable to do this with the Mac Mini. I can’t even find it on their website. What you want is TOSLink to MiniPlug adapter (this is the one I use). Like a lot of adapting cables, I have no idea how this magic works.

The Mac Mini will not boot without a keyboard attached, which is an annoying gotcha for a server. I just plugged in an old USB keyboard and threw it behind the entertainment center. The mini will still complain about the mouse, but it will boot. You can either plug in a mouse or just ignore it like I do.

External Storage

As for external storage, I just relocated my existing 1TB disk drive to a cheap external firewire enclosure. You will hear a lot of argument over Firewire 400 vs USB 2, but truth be told I have noticed very little if any difference.

I formatted the disk as Mac OS Journaled to avoid issues. The downside of this is that I cannot connect the external to a PC and copy the contents if I needed to do that. FAT32 will give you the file size limitations you don’t want on a backup server. From what I understand, you can modify your fstab under Snow Leopard to mount an NTFS volume as fully read-write, but having it be a native Mac OS volume hasnt really created any issues for me. I also suspect Time Machine would have an issue with a non-Mac partition.

Network Connectivity

Network connectivity is very important for a server – it moves a lot of big files. I use a Netgear Moca adapter to connect my entertainment center to the network. Ideally, I would get it connected to GigE but I dont have a way to pull Ethernet to my living room.

Since most of my remote connection to the server will be via wireless or internet, it doesn’t really make much difference.

Network Routing and DNS

For a lot of reasons, I prefer to use static DHCP IP assignments for all the devices on my network, and to give them local names assigned by the router.

Most people are used to setting up devices with DHCP, which basically just asks the router for an IP. With Static IP addressing, you can have the device request a specific IP. This provides a consistent IP assignment, which is helpful.

I prefer to use Static DHCP, a third option, as it solves a lot of problems with the first two. With Static DHCP, you specify on your router which MAC addresses get what IP address. Then you can assign a name to it in the router’s DNS server. For your devices, they think they are just using regular DHCP, which is probably how they came shipped, and will work predictably when you take them outside your network.

For example, my Mac Mini’s Ethernet port is setup for DHCP, but my router’s DHCP is setup to always assign the same IP address to that Ethernet port’s mac address. The DNS server on the router is then setup to assign the name ‘macmini-ethernet’ to that IP address.

Now I can connect to the macmini from any device on the network as ‘macmini-ethernet’ without modifying its local HOSTS file.

When I login to my router, I don’t have to guess which IP/MAC addresses shown as connected on my network are – they all have names assigned by the router independent of whatever that device thinks its name is.

You can also now edit port forwarding settings by device name to insure that if your device changes IP for any reason, the port forwarding still works.