Mac Mini query

[andyturpie]

Afternoon,

 

We have a 16gb Mac Mini which at the moment runs OD/AD gateway to around 25 elderly iMacs which we map students/staff home areas and a dumping ground for music teachers files. We are looking to replace our music suite with new macs and wish to relocate our old macs to other areas for utilisation, but where we cannot get a definitive answer is will ramping up the possible number of devices trying to authenticate up to say 60 clients, will this mac mini (which cannot take any more RAM) cut the mustard? The only main service that the server would perform is to save garage band/logic files in a shared area.

 

Brings me to the second question, is there a way to segment the machines so only the macs in the music room can see this mapped drive and the re-sited macs not?

 

TIA,

 

regards,

 

Andy T

[3s-gtech]

First question - it should be more than sufficient. Our slightly crusty old Mac Mini server does OD and Profile Manager for around 55 Macs here, that struggled with 4GB of RAM but is now fine with 8GB. It also manages all of our iPads. That's an old Core 2 Duo model. It's a bit of a push on the fairly slow disks for mass saving of projects - ours save Garageband ones to their network home areas (Windows ones) and Logic/Pro Tools go to a dedicated NAS. They used to use the Mac server for this and it worked okay, but the files took up too much space and it was pretty slow. Edited May 19, 2016 by 3s-gtech

[Norphy]

I agree, it should be more than adequate for authentication purposes, I've ran AD domain controllers on a lot less.

 

In terms of storage, a pair of 7200 (if you're lucky) rpm 2.5" hard drives will probably struggle to keep up with 60 macs it will probably struggle, it might be worth investing in a external thunderbolt storage array?

[andyturpie]

I agree, it should be more than adequate for authentication purposes, I've ran AD domain controllers on a lot less.

 

In terms of storage, a pair of 7200 (if you're lucky) rpm 2.5" hard drives will probably struggle to keep up with 60 macs it will probably struggle, it might be worth investing in a external thunderbolt storage array?

 

As I am looking for a procedure to allow the new replacement macs in music access a mapped drive to the mac mini and not allow the other macs access that should keep the overheads down. Was thinking of a couple of large SSDs on a RAID 1? But then backed up to a NAS?

[Norphy]

As I am looking for a procedure to allow the new replacement macs in music access a mapped drive to the mac mini and not allow the other macs access that should keep the overheads down. Was thinking of a couple of large SSDs on a RAID 1? But then backed up to a NAS?

 

Ok, that sounds reasonable, especially if you stick a couple of ssds in there.

 

It's been a long time since I've looked at share permissions on a Mac. Have you got OS X Server on the thing. There may be a way to restrict which machines have access to them in that.

[andyturpie]

Ok, that sounds reasonable, especially if you stick a couple of ssds in there.

 

It's been a long time since I've looked at share permissions on a Mac. Have you got OS X Server on the thing. There may be a way to restrict which machines have access to them in that.

 

Yep it is the OSX server OS - my tech is doing the research at the moment as to restricting drive mappings to certain groups of stations - I am hoping it can be done!

[andyturpie]

* I must add that the mac mini server is a core i5, I forgot to mention

[SamanthaD]

You should be able to set up 2 different device groups in Profile Manager, and map your drives accordingly in there?

 

As an aside, we map the Videos folder to the local hard drive to keep the user profile space down when students are editing video in iMovie. Means they have to use the same workstation throughout their project, but something we can live with. Might be worth considering for your application too?