Establish a remote connection to the Mac Mini Server
Figure out where your Mac Mini Server is going to live, plug it in, connect it to your network—that’d be your Ethernet network, not a wireless network—and turn it on.
The Mac Mini Server concedes the DVD drive for a second hard drive and Apple brilliantly installed the Snow Leopard Server software on the Mac Mini Server but didn’t configure it. Even more brilliantly, Apple turned on the Remote Management and Remote Login (SSH) by default. Oh, happy day.
In order to configure your Mac Mini Server, you have to be able to access it. Even if you have an assigned static IP address block from your internet service provider, chances are your router is still configured as a DHCP server, even if all of your devices are ignoring it. The problem is, more than likely you don’t know which IP address was grabbed by the Mac Mini Server. You could, of course, check your router logs for the last IP address passed to a device on your network—assuming that the Mac Mini Server was the last device to grab an IP address—but what fun is that.
Follow these steps to establish a remote connection to your Mac Mini Server across your network:
- Launch the Server Admin application that came on a DVD with your Mac Mini Server from one of the Macs on your network. It will report the IP address of the Mac Mini Server. You did install the Admin Tools CD while you were waiting for your memory upgrade to be delivered, right?
- If, by some chance, Remote Management isn’t turned on by default, follow these steps to activate Apple Remote Desktop (ARD):
- Open a Secure Shell (SSH) connection to the server by opening the terminal and at the prompt entering: ssh root@ip-address where ip-address is the IP address you discovered above
- You’ll be prompted for a password. Enter the first eight characters of the hardware serial number of your Mac Mini Server
- At the prompt enter the following: /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -users root -privs -all -restart -agent –menu
- You can now open a Virtual Network Computing (VNC) session to your server
- At the Mac OS X login screen, enter root in the Name field, the first eight characters of the hardware serial number of your Mac Mini Server in the Password field, and press Return. The familiar OS X installation Welcome screen appears.
- Follow the onscreen instructions to complete the installation of Mac OS X Server v10.6 Snow Leopard
- Install any necessary updates by selecting Software Update… from the Apple menu and following the onscreen instructions
