I added a Mac Mini Lion server to my home network over the holidays. My main goal was to have a computer that I could plug into the TV in the living room. I thought the mini would be ideal because it's small and can be easily hidden behind the HDTV. The only thing showing would be the bluetooth keyboard on the coffee table. I haven't told the wife yet because I'm still getting it to where I want it to be. I am running VMWare Fusion and have a stack for Windows 7, Ubuntu, and a combo stack for Trac/Subversion for when I get really going on the iPad development. I originally had the mini behind a second router in the basement, but I was having problems with IpSec VPN logins from the outside. I have since decided that it was due to some configuration issues, i.e., IP address masking. The only difficulty that I have come across so far is an inability to load TurboTax on the Windows 7 stack. This seems to be a known problem with the Intuit line of products that make changes to the boot sector of drives and other places to protect their "intellectual property". The attempt to load the software caused some permission and ownership changes throughout my mini that kept vMWare from executing properly. I refuse to load TurboTax on my mini directly, knowing that it will damage my system. So the load goes onto an old laptop until tax time is over. If there were another equivalent program I would change to it in a heartbeat. Intuit sucks!!!!
- LW
This is a blog mostly about techie things, what I am doing to my apartment network on the cheap, IOT, 3D Printing, Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, ESP32, ESP8266, Home Automation, Personal Weather Stations, Things That Go Bump in the Night, and some side issues that need discussing. Remember, sometimes the journey to an end is as much fun as the goal achieved!
