Any server application ideas for some old mac minis?

[Omega Mac]

Hey, I'd appreciate any tips, pointers, links to guides etc. on any projects or ideas to use some old mac minis in terms of servers, maybe as router/vpn/firewall between macs and the ISP modern, is this a valid use case here to harden security or is the mac pretty good as is standalone?

Played with flashing routers in the past with tomato but wondered if a spare mac would allow more capabilities. It feel slick a shame not to do something with hardware and learn a few things along the way. Other ideas was to see if I could play with linux on one of the minis.

Bottom line what am I trying to achieve, a more defensive/protective setup, in part as project and jsut in case. Maybe I'm thinking about it all wrong. Second proejct coudl be as NAS because i have multiple spare macs doing nothing!

Other idea was to to be able to remote into a Mac mini in another location and tunnel or vpn that, not sure the correct way/term, essentially remote desktop to mac far away.

In the meantime I'll meander around this forum for any pre-existing chat on the subject.

I also found this searching which is kinda on point too https://talk.tidbits.com/t/best-way-to-run-a-vpn-server-on-a-mac-replacing-macos-server-s-vpn/20483

Thanks for any advice in advance.

 

[kinga]

Cool project idea! I’ve seen people turn old Mac minis into lightweight home servers for things like Pi-hole (network-wide ad blocking) or even running Plex for media streaming. A NAS setup would also be a good use, especially if you have multiple minis sitting idle.

For VPN/remote access, something like WireGuard or OpenVPN on a Linux install could work really well if you’re up for tinkering. The hardware isn’t crazy powerful, but for learning and light server tasks, it’s more than enough.

I'm curious to see what direction you end up going; please keep us posted!

 

[Omega Mac]

Cool project idea! I’ve seen people turn old Mac minis into lightweight home servers for things like Pi-hole (network-wide ad blocking) or even running Plex for media streaming. A NAS setup would also be a good use, especially if you have multiple minis sitting idle.

For VPN/remote access, something like WireGuard or OpenVPN on a Linux install could work really well if you’re up for tinkering. The hardware isn’t crazy powerful, but for learning and light server tasks, it’s more than enough.

I'm curious to see what direction you end up going; please keep us posted!

Thanks so much for this. I think this is a great idea. Really great.

I have both i5 and i7 mac minis, do you think an i5 woudl be good enough for Pi-hole + VPN install or should I deploy the i5 for NAS/plex instead?

The i5's probably only have 4 or 8Gb of ram whereas the i7 think has 8/16GB, but the i&'s are server so have dual drive. I can swap out those drive for something larger. So maybe they should be the NAS.

I wonder so Pi-hole cut down on the execution of malicious code via browser ads and what not?

As a quick note, have looked at the website, pi-hole are now only recommending wiregaurd and no longer openvpn.

 

[Project Alice]

I have a 2009 Mac Mini 8GB RAM, 2TB HDD, with the 2.0GHz C2D. It runs Snow Leopard Server, and does a couple of different things for me.
Mainly, it serves as a netboot server for Mac OS X 10.3-10.6 with ready-to-use installations and the installers themselves. This is helpful to me as I'm a hoarder of PPC Macs.
The other thing it does is act as a time machine server for those Macs that are running Leopard.

I'm sure there's other things it can do, but it works great for my purposes. I already have a TrueNAS server which takes care of about everything else.

 

[!!!]

For VPN/remote access, something like WireGuard or OpenVPN on a Linux install could work really well if you’re up for tinkering. The hardware isn’t crazy powerful, but for learning and light server tasks, it’s more than enough.

Could also use Tailscale, which avoids IP change shenanigans.

I have both i5 and i7 mac minis, do you think an i5 woudl be good enough for Pi-hole + VPN install or should I deploy the i5 for NAS/plex instead?

Saying i5 and i7 don't really have much meaning. It's like saying V8 vs V6. Many years ago a V8 might only have about 200hp, meanwhile you can get a V6 with 400hp today. What's far more useful would be the year of the minis.

Chances are, any mini would be good enough for pihole, it was literally made to run on a rasberry pi. VPN would probably be okay with most minis, so long as your network connection isn't fast enough to bog the CPU.

For NAS, you'd definitely want a mini with at least gigabit ethernet, only problem is how you are going to connect the storage. SATA works, but it's hard to find large drives for 2.5". Being stuck with USB 2.0 is no fun, thunderbolt drives enclosures are rather expensive, and FireWire is dead. Any mini with USB 3.0 is basically perfect for the NAS category.

For streaming plex, most mini should be relatively okay. The speed requirements for streaming are fairly low, most blu-rays run at about 40Mb/s, which wouldn't even saturate a 100Mbit ethernet connection. The software side of things may pose more of an issue, but I'm happy using iTunes, plex may be more demanding.
If you want to transcode while streaming, though, you'll be limited to minis that have Intel GPUs with hardware encoding.

I wonder so Pi-hole cut down on the execution of malicious code via browser ads and what not?

Pihole will block connection attempts to ad servers. This cuts down on a lot of ads, but may not cut down on some tracking scripts or ads served from servers that also serve other content (and thus can't be blocked). An ad blocker in your web browser will be able to block the scripts, and it will speed up your browsing. Having both doesn't hurt at all, and piholes are especially useful for non-browsers, such as apps or smart TVs, or even blocking Apple's metrics (some of which are still uploaded even with the setting turned off).

 

[Galas]

I have an 2012 Quad i7 MacMini.
It runs VMWare ESXi (natively, bear in mind that those MM were in the Vendor HCL) with a couple VMs.
My own Router with PFsense (with a thunderbolt Gbit NIC)
PiHole
VPN server (Wireguard)
Backup Server (Nakivo)
Cloudflare tunnel

I do have another homeserver as a NAS, with a couple more services, but if I didn't I'd run a fileserver as well.