Beware Mac Mini

[Rick Whitelaw]

For a couple of years I've been running FMS on a mac mini. In the last two days the machine has gone "deaf" three times. Completely incommunicado. No network, and more significantly, no BlueTooth. This requires a hardware shut down and start up to fix. As we all know this is risky business for served files. Thankfully I'm the only user. Unfortunately it just happened again and I'm two hours from my office. The machine is clean. Nothing has changed in terms of configuration or software. There's no software on it other than FMS 13 and the usual Mac OS stuff. I've come to the conclusion that the Mac Mini is not a reliable machine and that I should change to another machine. Possibly another platform as well. Apart from the obvious limitations in terms of multiple users of FMS (not a concern to me) the machine isn't even robust enough to maintain connectivity. I would never suggest using a Mac Mini to host files. Too flakey.

 

Rick.

[Ocean West]

i have a mac mini as a server but i use to only mostly for testing while developing - before i move it to a clients machine or hosting. 

I have several clients using mini or an iMac - however i require them to have a Thunderbolt external RAID. and that is the boot volume too so if the mini / iMac itself has hardware issues swapping out a machine is fairly quick.

about 3 weeks ago my 2012 mac mini started to restart on its own with the multi - language error page. but would work and was able to back it up - Plus already have CrashPlan for important stuff. It turned out that the HDD portion of the Fusion drive died. and anything that addressed that part of the drive would crash the machine - AppleCare replaced it - and turned out they replaced the logic board too (a small connector wire was broke too) 

I had seutp VPN on my mini but at random intervals vpn stops working. so could be OS causing more issues then Hardware.

 

 

 

[Rick Whitelaw]

Yes, I suppose this could be the OS. This never happened before OX X 10.10.3.

[Richard Fincher]

I ran a Mac Mini for this purpose for a number of months before switching to an X-Serve 2009 model.  I didn't have a bad experience.  One difference might be that I chose to run Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion rather than Mavericks or Yosemite.  The latest version of Filemaker Server requires Mavericks I think, so I might have to upgrade soon.

Edited May 26, 2015 by Richard Fincher

[Simon Brown]

I think you need to update your OS. In particular, there have been problems with the resolver functionality (DNS) in Yosemite, which didn't really get better until after 10.10.3.

Best to disable the Fusion drive if present as it doesn't really help FMS much and may reduce the system's reliability. Most FMS servers would be better off with an all SSD based system anyway.

Also (and probably not likely in your case), if this system is Internet accessible, I've found that systems that have the standard SSH or SMB ports accessible can get pounded so relentlessly by hackers that it can make a system seem unresponsive, so a network scan to audit what ports are open might be in order.

 

 

[ggt667]

I must admit I do prefer to run production grade stuff on SuperMicros and not MacMinis,

however I also had a MacMini breaking down on me this summer; it was running 10.7.<<latest>>

 

No contact has been made again with this computer, luckily the backup was on a stick :-)

Edited September 8, 2015 by ggt667

[Richard Fincher]

Agree with the comment about unfiltered daemon ports in datacentres.  Our Mac servers are behind PIX firewalls with only port 5003 open to the world.  

[Rick Whitelaw]

Ages ago I bumped the Mini to 8gb and a faster and bigger drive. No further problems.