TheRaven64's Journal: Mac Mini

I finally decided to order a Mac Mini. Not as a desktop, but as a colocated server (with the company featured on Slashdot a while back). One thing that they don't advertise is that their `remote hands' service allows you to change operating systems. While I am very pleased with OS X as a desktop, I would rather have something a little more command line oriented on a server (yes, I know you can do most things on the command line with OS X, but it is not really designed for it). To this end, I shall be installing OpenBSD on it as soon as it arrives. This means that I will have a 1.42GHz RISC system running OpenBSD with 20GB of bandwidth a month for $22.99. The closes competitors I found for this were several times the price for a similar service - largely due to the fact that they required 1U systems which cost a whole lot more to host.

Once the system is set up and running, I will post more details.

very cool

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Is there an additional charge for changing the OS? Is Debian available? If so, could I then SSH in and apt-get install from online repositories?

Re:very cool

[TheRaven64]

The change of OS is accomplished by the `remote hands' feature. $20 buys 2 hours of someone's time to sit by the system and do what I tell them to. I am making use of this facility to install another OS. OpenBSD is not officially supported, but they don't actually care what is running on the machine unless it violates their terms of service (i.e. you must have a license for everything, don't use it to do anything illegal).

In answer to ryanr's question, the box is owned by me, and no one else has an acco

Yes, please update

[ryanr]

I'd love to hear more later on. That's about what I'm looking for. Since you got to specify OpenBSD, I guess you get to admin the whole box?