[Koha] Mac Mini

[Christopher L Middleman]

I wanted to respond to poster who was wondering about the Mac mini.  
Here is something to think about: 
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/08/28/faster.than.quad.core.g5/

I am not sure if you really need to worry about raid and hot swapable 
power supplies.  These may not be needed.  If you are doing full backups 
once a week and incrementals every day having a hard drive go down will 
not be a huge pain.  Do not get me wrong, Raid is nice, but you are 
going to spend $350 for a quality raid by 3Ware.  Look here for 
information on backup software: 
http://xanana.ucsc.edu/xtal/backup_X_and_fink.html

If you are a large syten then a fully decked server would be a smart 
choice but if you are small do not waste your money like some people are 
suggesting here.  You can always get something like this: 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822165026 to take 
care of your storage needs.  Your only problem may be growth but that 
depends on the size of your library.  There are other ones out there 
that connect with a PCIe card.  You really need to think about how much 
disk space you will need.  250MB will probably be enough cosidering that 
the bulk of it will be text. 

A few people in this group think spending the money and having paying 
outside people to do it is the answer.  Try it on your own at first and 
see what happens.  You already own the Mac Mini you will lose nothing by 
installing the software and seeing what happens.  If you do decide to go 
the server route I suggest installing Ubuntu for the software.  There 
are a ton of tutorials on how to handle that stuff and the forums are 
great for help without the attitude you get from some of the other distros.