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I’ve never tried turning a Mac into a home server. What features do you need that it’s missing?

• toast0 2y ago
  Depends what 'home server' means. MacOS would need syncookies to be a viable tcp server on public IPs, IMHO, but MacOS pulled FreeBSD's TCP stack a couple months before syncookies were added, and they never rebased or otherwise added syncookies later. I haven't looked into if they pulled any scalability updates over the years, but I kind of assume they haven't, and the stack would have a lot of lock contention if you had more than say 10,000 tcp sockets. Given that, if I were Apple compatible, I might run a mini as a LAN server, but my home servers provide services for the LAN as well as some public services (of limited value and usefulness, but still public).
  • astrange 2y ago
    The network stack is very different now - BSD doesn't run on cell phones after all. But no syncookies, no. But IMO the real advantage of ARMv8 for a server is that it has better security.
    • teaearlgraycold 2y ago
      Perhaps they would be good execution nodes if not good endpoints.
    • saagarjha 2y ago
      I don't really think ARMv8 has anything useful to provide here?
      • astrange 2y ago
        It's all in there, it's just optional. Plus it doesn't have variable length instructions.
        • saagarjha 2y ago
          I'm still not entirely sure what the security improvements are?
  • carlosjobim 2y ago
    Is this something that you can fix by putting the server behind Cloudflare? I assume most "home server" users would do that (or a similar service provided by Apple if they go down that route).
    • toast0 2y ago
      Well, Cloudflare is kind of spendy if you want them to proxy non-http traffic. If you put a proxy in front, and you're careful to only allow inbound connections from the proxy, you should be ok though.