My old Mac mini (late 2009; 3,1 model) was just sitting in its box. I don’t want to retire it for good. This machine is memorable for me. I bought it in 2010. I used this machine for learning Objective-C and iOS development. It’s paltry 320GB HDD died in around 2013 and I replaced it with a 120GB SSD. It saw a tremendous speed boost just by installing an SSD.

Fast forward to 2019 and after many Macbook Pro acquisitions, I still can’t say goodbye to my old Mac mini. I decided to give it a new breath of life by turning it into my personal server. The latest Mac OS Catalina no longer supports this old hardware. However, FreeBSD still supports it. I installed FreeBSD 12.0 on it. I configured and recompiled the kernel, stripping a lot of kernel drivers that are not present to further speed up the old hardware. Here is the server information:

$ uname -a
FreeBSD nataesha 12.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE NATAESHA  amd64

Then I also installed PostgreSQL database, Apache web server, Joomla CMS, OpenJDK Java tools, and other open source software dependencies. The Mac mini now serves this website.