Minibellum Project

I thought I would jot down some notes about a project I’m working on. I recently decided to replace my file server at home. The aging 600 MHz ‘Cerebellum’ with about 140GB worth of internal HDDs has been taken out and my 1.2 GHz Mac Mini, renamed ‘Minibellum’ with about 300GB of storage has taken its place. I’m trying my best to get as much use out of the Mini as I can; it seems like such a waste spending so much money on that thing and never using it. With the issues I was running into with Cerebellum, I thought about the small size, minimal power consumption, and rock solid stability OSX has to offer and decided that it would be perfect for the job.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been getting into learning the innards of Mac OSX and the UNIX based Console system it’s using. To have the new Minibellum live up to Cerebellum’s standards in terms of what it can do for my home network, I have had to do a lot of configuration outside what the basic OSX GUI offers. Getting everything going such as the FTP server, remote administration, web server, and even basic file sharing with specific volumes (in this case the external HDD) wasn’t real easy when you leave OSX’s hand holding. However once I got everything going, maintaining and editing the configuration of everything was super nice.

Speaking of configuration, I’ve came across a couple pieces of free software that made implementation of network volume sharing and virtual users within the FTP capabilities very smooth. If your looking to use your OSX box as a file server, you need to check out Hornware: SharePoints and PureFTPd Manager.

All that’s left is a handful of small security issues I need to overcome, and then it should be good to go as far as opening it up for remote access and such…