@daleallyn Second that. One "spindle" (to use the old rotating media vernacular), is risky, ESPECIALLY in a Mac. The on board T3 security chip encodes the "hard drive" (SSD) to the motherboard, and if any component fails, your stored data becomes completely unaccessible and likely unrecoverable. ALWAYS have a backup on a second device, and ideally that device, running a completely difference OS than the server itself (a sometimes impediment to ransomeware's OS level encryption lockout).
According to how important the system is to your company, a business continuity plan and the associated disaster recovery plan needs to be in place and executable.
Business continuity can be as simple as a second server in a box, that can be resurrected, restored from LOCAL (not cloud - takes too long) backup, and put back into service. Claris's old "warm" failover has been gone for years, but products like Mirrorsync can keep 2 servers in real time sync, so if one goes down, the other can pick up.
And a redundant hat or warm swap server resolved the argument that Minis don't have the redundancy of a server (dual power, dual drives, dual networks, etc.) so a MirrorSync type solution can be useful.
Remember, disaster recovery is a more catastrophic nut; the equipment/building burns to the ground, lightning strikes, someone steals all the servers, etc. In those cases, off-site storage avoids a "business extinction" event.
I guess you are talking about the on SSD inside the Mx chip. Are external disks also encoded that way, for example an external drive used by Time Machine ?
Goes back further than the Mn series chips. The T3 on the motherboard security chip first appeared back in intel days. My 2018 mini has it. Started when SSDs were soldered on the motherboard.
For in house DNS (so your Fully Qualified Domain Name associated with your SSL is functional on the LAN) can be simply accomplished a number of ways. One of the simplest is NAMO, a tiny bit of brilliant MacOS code that provides an in house DNS service.
If your networked computers get their DNS addresses from a router setting, just make the FMS machine that has NAMO running on it (or whatever your in-house DNS server is), the first DNS address in the list.
If DNS is being mapped on each desktop, you’ll have to touch each one to change the dns settings.
Note: DNS is set in an interface. If you have say, FMGo devices that work inside and outside a firewall, make the WiFi interface DNS the in-house DNS machine and let the public DNS associated with the cellular data take care of it outside the LAN.
Any one of these solutions needs to avoid the live database - or pause the database first. Doesn't matter it is is FM or Oracle, or MySQL, attempting an OS level backup of a live database has a very high probability of corrupting the database at some point.
Looked at DNS enabler - far more comprehensive than NAMO, but as a result, far more confusing to the novice. Still, I like it a lot, and will probably shift off NAMO over toDNS Enabler.
I've used Pi-Hole at home for years for DNS, but Google's insertion of tracking into almost every query has made the Pi-Hole blacklists so frequent as to make the internet almost unusable unless you specifically know the end-point URL
One of my anti-tracking methods is: Set a custom DNS server in the router. I use servers of the German DNS providers digitalcourage.de and dnsforge.de.
The rationale for an inhouse DNS server was the SSL FQDN resolution on a private net requires a private DNS setup as the first DNS lookup internally to the LAN
Hi Barefoot,
I run a M2, 8gb,256HD Mini since 4 Month. Before we ran our 8GB, 10 files, 5-10 Users Solution on a Mini2017 INtel.
It is very stable, the MacOs if you are familiar is nice.
We ran this solution already on Windows on AWS, then on a 2012 Mini, then on the 2017Intel Mini and now on the M2.. which I think will give us 5 years of happiness.
We do all backups on the local SSD but every two hours make a backup on an T5 SSD external and once daily but all on AWS with Chronosync.
I always think.. it would be nice to buy a cheap Linux Box, instead of this much overkill macOS M2.. but since it works.. and I am an entrepreneur.. I just keep it running.
I have tinkered with Ubuntu on AWS.. So I know how it works..
Ahh. I run the latest in everything.. Just updated to Sonoma 14.2.1.. This improved very much.. For two years now we run updates, no stopping/starting Server.. just do it and all comes back up normally.
Us DnsEnabler for Internal DNS.
5 Mac Users, 5 iPad internal unsers.. Little Webdirect.
Great thanks @pfro. What I also throw in into our decision making is power consumption and the mini Mac seams to be very frugal with it. Apparently the computing power per watt is top and for a low load server especially.