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.