New to Mac...

I just bought a Aluminum Macbook the new one with the 250gb hard drive. I moved over from a Ubuntu based Toshiba laptop. I'm really liking it! I am an army medic serving in Afghanistan. we have really slow satellite internet. Before i bought my Mac i was working on building a Web Caching DNS Caching server with a Shuttle case but i don't have the time to learn all the terminal commands. I was thinking A Mac mini would make an excellent Ultra mobile Server. does MAC have a selection of GUIs for this purpose? I am part of a Forward Surgical Team we move all over Afghanistan Providing Surgical capability's deep in the mountains. the need for ultra portability is essential. can i do this with mac?

thanks
Jonathan

The Mini is often used as a light-weight server for personal means. I am not sure how much I'd want to rely on a consumer product for military purposes though.

OS X Leopard Server probably provides more interface options than the standard install of OS X, but I am not an expert.

its only going to be used for Personal internet Instant messaging facebook myspace that kind of thing. only 15 people on the network. never all at the same time. i like the ultra portability of the Mac mini I could put it in a pelican case that would fit it and its plugs exceptionally for mobility on the go. when we go on missions everything must either fit in our assault packs or in the back of our two Gators.

John Deere Gator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

we drive them into the back of the CH-47 Helicopter go to the mission site and in 30 minutes have surgical capability. Our satellite internet is for Morale and welfare contact with family. i figure having Web and DNS caching capability will reduce our bandwidth usage allowing people to access web sites faster than normal. does anyone know the down and dirty way to do this?

thanks
Jonathan

I wish I could help, but I really don't know enough about the server capabilities of OS X. With that said, I just want to take a moment to thank you for your service and let you know how much we appreciate what you guys (and gals) are doing over there.

thanks...do you know where i should go for such info?

Hi Combat Medic!

Along with cwa, I would also like to thank you for your service.

I use OSX Tiger Server on a Mac Mini at home to act as a server on my public internet side. Although Leopard server offers new features and such, tiger was extremely easy to configure, and has a gui for most all base configurations and install to configuration to inplace operation (with dns, web, ftp, ssh, mail, webmail) took about an hour to an hour and a half; most of the time was in the install.

The only thing that is gui, but you will probably still need to manually configure is the DNS. The default DNS configuration generated by the gui works, but:

1) is not set to work on a subnet of a class C for reverse resolution (manual configuration works fine)

2) It is a lot less secure then I would like (can work as a referring dns and open access dns out of the box, needs to be clamped down).

Now, these two issues may have been addressed in Leopard, I don't know. But I am quite pleased with my OSX server after coming from using linux servers for a long time.

You'll probably want to do some research on osx server web caching to check on that functionality. The default config on the dns (on tiger at least) is as a caching server.

Hope this helps a bit.