My Home Network

Xinam

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Location
UK
Recently completed some upgrades to my home network. It's mostly all stored away neatly in a cupboard so you don't see any wires.

Standalone VDSL modem (80/20 service) with an Apple Time Capsule acting as router and downstairs wireless AP. Using a gigabit switch for all wired devices downstairs. Connected via CAT6 is another gigabit switch upstairs which handles wired devices in kids bedroom, then onto an Apple AirPort Extreme in the loft which is the upstairs wireless AP. There's a CAT6 drop into each room upstairs too.

We're mainly an Apple household so I've got a 2014 Mac mini as my server, with one thunderbolt 2tb drive for network storage and a USB 3 2tb drive for a Time Machine backup destination. Protected by UPS/surge protector as seen in photo.

IMG_2988.jpg
 
Great. And about how much energy do you think that thing uses overall? What OS is installed on that Mac?
 
Great. And about how much energy do you think that thing uses overall? What OS is installed on that Mac?



It runs the latest macOS. I'm running the Mac mini headless so power consumption is quite low - it's quite efficient at power management really. And it spins the disks down when it's not being accessed.
 
Well I am running Apples stand-alone server application, but they have integrated a lot of the features into the base version of macOS now. It's fine for home use I think, it caches macOS, iOS and app updates automatically so multiple devices don't have to individually download the whole thing over the internet.
 
And why do you prefer MacOS over a server-oriented OS?

To be fair though, it's a capable OS for serving. Being originally based on the FreeBSD Kernel and all. And that powers a lot of the web's infrustructure - routers, DNS Server, some webservers. It's networking stack is second to none - or it used to be anyway, hence why it was taken by Microsoft, I think from Vista onwards, and incorporated into their OS.

You'd probably run into more performance issues having a traditional server OS on it - with not having customised drivers for NICs and all that jazz.
 
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