I have seen several articles over the years indicating that there are no problems in using a standard / client version of OS X as a server instead of using the OS X Server version, which is a darn sight more expensive. And indeed I have used a Mac mini with a client version of OS X for several years as a file and music server. It needs very little power, is small and just sits there unobtrusively doing it’s job 24×7.
However since I migrated all our Macs, including the server, to Snow Leopard (OS X V10.6), the Mac that I use as my work station has been driving me crazy. Any time I connect it to a network drive, it hangs itself up. Not straight away, but often after it has gone to sleep for a while. After that, as soon as I access a network drive again, the Finder hangs with a spinning beach ball and all the other processes become unresponsive. Usually the only solution is to reboot. Very frustrating, and bad enough to make me think seriously whether I wouldn’t be better migrating to Linux, since Apple has in the mean time issued two updates to Snow Leopard and the problem is as bad as ever. Ruth has had similar problems, but not so bad.
Three weeks ago I saw someone offering a new copy of Snow Leopard Server on EBay and I decided to bid for it. I ended up getting it for 177 Euro instead of the list price of 499 Euro. I installed it on the Mac mini server and to my surprise, all our Macs are now running rock solid again. The problems accessing network drives that Ruth and I had have vanished completely.
So, although many experts confidently insist that you can use the OS X client version as a home server (I don’t think anyone would propose to run it in a production environment), that doesn’t seem to be true in the case of Snow Leopard, although I have previously had no problems whatsoever for several years using the Tiger and Leopard clients as servers. I thought I would post this, as I haven’t seen anyone report this experience previously – maybe it will help someone else having similar problems. (I suspect a cheaper alternative might be to migrate a problematic Snow Leopard home server back to a Leopard client, but haven’t tried that.)
