OT - Small DNS "appliances" for remote offices.

Thu Feb 19 19:47:48 UTC 2015

If your time is worth anything, you can't beat the Mac Mini, especially for a branch office mission-critical application like DNS.

I just picked up a Mini from BestBuy for $480. I plugged it in, applied the latest updates, purchased the MacOSX Server component from the Apples Store ($19), and then via the Server control panel enabled DNS with forwarding.

Total time from unboxing to working DNS: 20 minutes.

The Server component smartly ships with all services disabled, in contrast to a lot of Linux distros, so it's pretty secure out of the box. You can harden it a bit more with the built-in PF firewall. The machine is also IPv6 ready out of the box, so my new DNS server automatically services both IPv4 and IPv6 clients.

You get Apple's warranty and full support. Any Apple store can do testing and repair.

And with a dual-core 1.4GHz I5 and 4GB memory, it's going to handle loads of DNS requests.

Of course, if your time is worth little, spend a lot of time tweaking slow, unsupported, incomplete solutions.

 -mel

On Feb 19, 2015, at 11:32 AM, Denys Fedoryshchenko <denys at visp.net.lb>
 wrote:

> On 2015-02-19 18:26, Valdis.Kletnieks at vt.edu wrote:
>> On Thu, 19 Feb 2015 14:52:42 +0000, David Reader said:
>>> I'm using several to connect sensors, actuators, and such to a private
>>> network, which it's great for - but I'd think at least twice before deploying
>>> one as a public-serving host in user-experience-critical role in a remote
>>> location.
>> I have a Pi that's found a purpose in life as a remote smokeping sensor and
>> related network monitoring, a task it does quite nicely.
>> Note that they just released the Pi 2, which goes from the original single-core
>> ARM V6 to a quad-core ARM V7, and increases memory from 256M to1G. All at the
>> same price point.  That may change the calculus. I admit not having gotten one
>> in hand to play with yet.
> Weird thing - it still has Ethernet over ugly USB 2.0
> That kills any interest to run it for any serious networking applications.
> 
> ---
> Best regards,
> Denys