mhcg.co.uk

New Mac mini server arrived, no monitor, keyboard or mouse so sited with my other server(ish) type boxes, time to try out the Remote Setup, first time I've tried this and all I can say is FANTASTIC !  Surely it wouldn't be out of the bounds of possibility for Microsoft or Ubuntu to implement something like this, or maybe even HP for use with SmartStart??? Certainly beats stood around in a freezing cold server room.  Yes I know HP have ILO for remote management, but you still generally have to swap disks and things, none of that with the Apple solution.

If you've never used remote setup on Mac OS X, in a nut shell you plug the new box into the network, switch it on then goto another mac, install the Server Admin tools from the included CD and run Server Admin.  New machine is identified as 'Ready for Setup' (so long as DHCP is enabled on your network) and you run through the Setup Assistant just as you would if you were using the new box locally.

I ran through the Setup Assistant and picked 'Administrator' for the user it wants to create as it creates this as a local users so wouldn't really want to use my own name for that as I indent to use Open Directory.  Used my internet domain name (mhcg.co.uk) for Primary DNS and enabled all servers (Mail Server, Address Book Server, iChat Server, some other services that can't remember right now) and used the second disk 'Macintosh HD2' for the services data store.  As a side note, the main/first disk is called 'Server HD' and is where Mac OS X Server is pre-installed.  You don't need to enable all the services but as I'm going to be trying them all out over the coming weeks, thought it be easier to turn them all on now.  One of the questions is around user names, I picked the option to create users and groups which enabled Open Directory as a Master server.

Once the setup is complete, server is then up and running and appeared in the Shared area of Finder on the remote mac I was using.  Everything is configured from what I can see using Server Admin, seems fairly straight forward although I'm a bit confused over the DNS details right now, I'm sure it'll make sense over the next few days.