Ask HN: Has anyone used an M1 Mac Mini as a server and liked it?

8 points by dwrodri ↗ HN

11 comments

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Use one as a file server at home and it works great.
MacOS is a terrible server OS if you're exposing TCP services to the public. FreeBSD's tcp stack is great, but not the one Apple picked from the late 90s before they added syncache/syncookies and never rebased.
You could put it behind cloudflare tunnel or something
> MacOS is a terrible server OS if you're exposing TCP services to the public.

I wish you had listed at least one or a few technical reasons why that is the case. It's assertions like these which uninformed people then go around parroting in unrelated contexts, in the hopes of gaining HN points because someone with 18k odd HN points made this statement, so surely it must be true. This is how all the "experts have said ..." information gets born.

It has no syncookies or syncache, as I alluded to. It is super trivial to synflood a mac that listens on tcp port.

The port of pf has a synfilter, but that doesn't work for traffic to the host, it might work for forwarded traffic, but not for the host itself.

Thank you for adding this detail.
It reads like they added it.

I thought Apple rebased at some point but maybe that was when NeXT merged with Apple.

They did, but they is FreeBSD there. Pronoun confusion, I'll work on it.
After replacing the whole server zoo in the last company with M1 Minis I am now slowly going through all my servers, and the servers I set up for friends & family, and replace them with M2 Minis.

- Trivial to set up, and run. - Super low power consumption. - No noise. - Dirt cheap.