A while back I bought a Mac Mini to be the house server. Since it wasn’t going to be stressed too much, I just got the base configuration, and planned to leave it that way.

Well, the 512MB of memory was adequate, but the pathetically slow hard drive was not. Fortunately, the nice folks at Other World Computing were offering an attractive deal: for $99, they send you a box, pay for overnight shipping both ways, and install any combination of memory, hard drive, and optical drive purchased from them. To make it even more attractive, they give you cash back for the old parts.

I kept the optical drive, doubled the RAM, and upgraded to a larger, faster, quieter hard drive, and they gave me $80 for the old parts. I had my upgraded machine back in 72 hours, and it’s now happily running Tiger Server.

On that note: “Dear Apple, please write some decent documentation for your server product, and fix the layout of your management GUI. Love, J”. For instance, it would be nice to know how many characters are permitted in the shared secret and user passwords when you’re setting up an IPsec VPN. It’s not fun to guess why you can’t authenticate…