Apple: SSH and FileVault

Biggest change for corporate non-personal Mac usage. Mac Minis are actually fairly good value and good quality for miscellaneous automation purposes. We started switching over to them at work, and the FileVault issue described here was actually one of the big things holding us back.

Ive been curious about using some Macs for general purpose servers. Is there anything else you do to make them easier to administrate as servers? Are you running Mac-specific stuff on them or more general purpose Linux containerized stuff?

It's generally a bad idea to use consumer hardware for servers.

One reason Google was a big hit was because (while all the competition was doubling down on big iron), they ran their search on commodity hardware, and compensated in software/networking.

I don't think Macs would be a great platform for running a k8s cluster, but the power efficiency alone makes them a curious alternative to explore.

Google used x86 Linux machines. Which is common in industry. Everything is documented, unlike Apple's offerings.

> Which is common in industry.

It was *not* common in mid-90s. x86 was commodity hardware - home PCs, early NT workstations. PHP was still written in Perl. Linux was a few years old - industry veterans (e.g. Greenspun) were throwing rocks at it.

Yes, the x86 platform was documented - through reverse-engineering efforts. Compaq was the first to produce PC clones, to IBM's great disdain.

Don't get me wrong - you're probably better off running Ampere. Just don't dismiss commodity hardware.

PHP was written in C. To quote Rasmus Lerdorf:

“I wonder why people keep writing that PHP was ever written in Perl. It never was. #php”

The PHP history page at one point claimed it was:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090426061624/http://us3.php.ne...

He may have had some Perl scripts on his computer before the 1.0 C release, but that’s a far cry from “PHP was written in Perl”.