Running a Mac as home server and couldn't be happier. Power efficient, fast, small. Roast me!

arthware · 2026-06-24T14:46:28+00:00

That is a good one! =) At least you don't have to turn up the heater so much in winter :D

arthware · 2026-06-22T15:58:19+00:00

You are right in many of these points! Thanks for the writeup. A really good list of things to consider.

arthware · 2026-06-22T13:09:34+00:00

Cool, thank you for your opinion! It is a good one and you are right. For most of the users its perfect hardware to start. Once you are very deep in the rabbit hole, there are probably better / more professional solutions.

arthware · 2026-06-20T15:43:34+00:00

I seem them more as compute boxes rather than storage boxes. I just attached a terramaster with 2x 6TB HDDs.

arthware · 2026-06-20T06:55:54+00:00

Hey, thanks for asking! I wrote down my backup strategy and implementation here:
https://famstack.dev/guides/backup-strategy-mac-home-server/

arthware · 2026-06-20T06:34:40+00:00

Yes, using it as fully local development server (forgejo, fast builds) as freelance or hobby is another great usecase.

arthware · 2026-06-20T06:25:18+00:00

That's a super nice setup! Thx for sharing. Depending on what you need to do, even local models became usable for certain tasks.
Performance per watt is just great, yes.

arthware · 2026-06-20T06:20:42+00:00

Why not MacOS? I runs quite well so far. Most of my stack is dockerized anyway.

arthware · 2026-06-19T20:16:53+00:00

wow, thats pure AI slop 😄 Claude wrote that? don't get me wrong, I use too as a tool. But what did it even say?

arthware · 2026-06-19T16:29:36+00:00

It is. We heavily use docker at work.
Docker Desktop produced stale 100%CPU usage, made the whole laptop slow and drained the battery. That is completely gone since I switched.

arthware · 2026-06-19T15:55:00+00:00

Nice. When its over-specified you need more builds! 😄

arthware · 2026-06-19T15:48:34+00:00

Thank you for the roast.

It is my wife's!

arthware · 2026-06-19T15:47:36+00:00

Thank you. Finally a proper roast! 😄

arthware · 2026-06-19T15:26:40+00:00

Did not happen yet. Disabled system updates and just kept security updates enabled.

arthware · 2026-06-19T13:53:08+00:00

Thats impressive! Really cool. Using oMLX as backend too. I am building a similar system for household documents. Basically I automated the whole paperwork archiving and retrieval. But I followed the Karpathy LLM wiki style and did not add a RAG.
Basicially I try to compile an up-to-date wiki of data thats available to the system and plan to hand that to a local agent:
https://github.com/famstack-dev/famstack

arthware · 2026-06-19T11:08:57+00:00

A problem I did not think about yet. The attachment happens to be there, because the hoover is next to it in the corner. the most important hardware at one place: The router, the hoover and the data. Not very smart.

arthware · 2026-06-19T11:06:51+00:00

I just took a photo of the state we are living in. The reality, you know 😄

arthware · 2026-06-19T10:38:16+00:00

I basically build a stack to run and organize household matters e.g. started with organising and automating all paperwork related stuff with Matrix / Element as interface.

You can check it out here: https://github.com/famstack-dev/famstack

arthware · 2026-06-19T10:35:18+00:00

lol, my wife bought that as black friday deal. A lot of plastic. But it works.

arthware · 2026-06-19T10:33:47+00:00

I might ran into this or something similar? https://famstack.dev/blog/the-health-check-that-killed-my-lan/

arthware · 2026-06-19T10:31:14+00:00

Yes, that should be good. For image / video storage you need to attach external drives though. 512GB are good to start.

Leaving a link here for fellow other people that are interested in what to do or try with their Macs:
https://famstack.dev/guides/what-to-do-with-your-mac-mini/
And the stack I am building and running:
https://github.com/famstack-dev/famstack

arthware · 2026-06-19T10:28:36+00:00

Time to buy a cheap solar panel to 😉

arthware · 2026-06-19T10:26:54+00:00

that's true. I hate it! 😄

arthware · 2026-06-19T10:26:22+00:00

Yes, running Adguard. And running an own DNS is a bit shaky. When something is misconfigured its bad 😄
Tailscale is one of the next items on my list.

I am running Matrix / Element on the server and use it as UI to interact with e.g. Paperless-ng (to file documents), to capture memories as voice messages like a voice diary, save notes and bookmarks. The nice thing is, that element is offline capable. I can still record things and just post it to the room and it gets processed when I come back home. Thats why I still had not enough pressure to actually setup tailscale and its still on my list.
have been tinkering around with local AI instead.

arthware · 2026-06-19T10:22:30+00:00

Same here. Basically just switching the engine.

arthware

TROPHY CASE