Using a 2010 Mac Mini as a local server

What?

Yea you heard me right, I made my 2010 Mac Mini into a local server for myself to use!

Why waste your time on a slow Mac Mini?

I dared myself to waste my precious time on making my Mac Mini into a server because, firstly, this Mac Mini was laying around my room doing nothing but collecting dust, secondly, I wanted to use my old tech as servers since I barely use them for anything.

I chose the Mac Mini and not my Dell Optiplex 755 CC due to it's sleek design.

Specifications

• Model: Macmini4,1 (Mac Mini Mid-2010)
• OS: Debian 12 Bookworm x86_64
• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 @2.4GHz (You heard that right!)
• GPU: NVIDIA Geforce 320M (256MB of VRAM)
• HDD: 320GB 5400 RPM Unknown
• RAM: 6 GB Mismatched
• 4 GiB Unknown
• 2 GiB Official Apple Stick

The HDD is pretty slow, it took over 3-4 minutes booting into Debian.

Software

I'm currently using Docker to host 3 containers, all of them being:

• Navidrome (A local music player)
• A basic file browser
• Pi-hole (Ad-blocker, can't really explain much, please, please please please read about it yourself.)

Click on the image to see the full resolution.

I'm using Portainer for a Web UI since I don't want to be really messing around with a terminal and mess something up in Docker.. And potentially break even *more* stuff.

Conclusion

Making a homelab server is fun if you want to mess around with Docker or web server stuff, Docker surprisingly doesn't really use that much RAM, I expected it to use more than at least 1 GiB, but it's pretty lightweight if you're not hosting anything too resource heavy. I don't know what else to say.

Everything was made with the help of fzorb.