Howdy there folks, I'm Quinn of Snazzy Labs. As technology increases at an incredible rate, our once shiny Macs become a little dusty. We either, you know, put them on a shelf and never touch them again, or we sell them for scraps on Craigslist or

eBay, but there's actually a better use you can make out of an old Mac and I'm going to show you that today: turning it into a home server. Now I have in front of me a 2009 MacBook. It still is a great machine; it's really loud and the hard

drive is clicking, which worries me a little bit, so that's probably on its way out. But other than that, it's a really good machine. The CPU is respectable and it will actually serve its purpose fine as a Mac OS home server. How are we gonna do this? Well, we're gonna use Mac OS Server, which is an application provided by Apple. And now if you look in the App Store, this thing has one point five out of five stars. It's truly horrible, one of the lowest rated apps in the Mac App Store, period, especially made by Apple. Now part of the reason why people are so

pissed is because it used to be a really, really powerful, truly enterprise-level kind of piece of software, and now it's really been kind of truncated, trimmed down to be more of a home server type app. And so for pros, they're pissed that it's been kind of neutered, but for

people like us, it actually becomes a really great useful app. Now here's the thing: the version that you use greatly depends on the operating system version that you're running. Mac OS Server was sold as a separate operating system up until the Lion days. So as of Lion, they

combined Mac OS and Mac OS Server into a single OS, and then you had to pay a license fee to unlock it. And then, as of several versions ago, they began selling it as an independent app inside of the Mac OS App Store, so it's $20. And this is

the weird thing, so you need to purchase the application on a Mac that's running 10.14.11 or 10.14 or newer at the point of time of this video. So you'd have 10.14 or newer, you will not be able to buy the app. Once you buy the app

on a new Mac, you can go to install it on an old Mac, and you'll see that once I click this button, "Install Mac OS Server," I'm running El Capitan on this machine. It's going to say, "Hey, look, you can't install the latest version of this app,

but would you like to download the last compatible version with your operating system?" We're going to say yes and click "Download Now." This works if you're running El Capitan or newer. If you're running an older version of Mac OS, like Mavericks or older, you are going to have

to find it through Apple's old, like antiquated support document, Server 3.2.2. And so, I will link to that down below, and how to find that version of Mac OS. You have to go to the web browser, click a link, and then it opens a special page

in the Mac App Store. It's very janky, but it does work. So once you've got that downloaded, you're going to open it, and then we'll configure it, and I'll let you see what you can do. So before we open Mac OS Server and actually start

configuring stuff we need to make sure that our network settings are set up correctly. You really should use an Ethernet cable if you have the ability to. Using Wi-Fi is really not ideal when you're running a server, the kind of database environment, and so you should use

a wired Ethernet connection. Also, if you have a much older Mac and you're on a 10/100 Ethernet card, it's not a Gigabit Ethernet card, you should look online to find maybe a FireWire capable Gigabit Ethernet card that will greatly speed up the rate at which your server can

distribute files and information to other computers on your network. Once you've got that figured out, we're going to need to open network preferences. Now, if you click on Ethernet, it will show you your local IP address. Now, 10.1.10.197, yours is probably

192.168.1.1, something, a number 0 to 250, and this is good, this is what's been generated automatically and assigned by your router. The problem is is that we need to manually define the IP address on our network because we need to let

the other computers on our network know where they can always find our server. If the IP address is always changing based on when this thing reboots, or every few days or weeks, that's going to become an issue. So, we are going to click 'Use DHCP',

with 'Manual Address', and what I would recommend is that you use the exact same address that's been automatically assigned to this machine. So, it can be any number from 0 to 250. We'll just do 10.1.10.197. If you don't know what your

IP address is or you'll want to give it a different one. You can give it any other IP address you want so long as it's not the same as another computer on your network. To check to ensure that it doesn't have the same IP

address as another computer on your network, you can open Terminal and then you can type the word 'ping'. So that's to send packets and then receive them back. So we can ping for example, let me do my local server here. Might you know 336 terabyte server, this is the IP address

of that server. So when I ping it, I am going to, it's going to send packets and then receive them back. If I press Control+C it will give me a summary. So I transmitted eight packets, I received eight packets back. That means that there's zero loss and therefore

that IP address already exists on the network. Now if I tried, I don't know, if I ping 10.1.10.153, press Enter, it is not receiving any bytes back. There's a request timeout. So it's trying to send packets, they're not coming back.

That's a hundred percent packet data loss, which means that IP address is available. So we can do 10.1.10. let's do 153 for this Macbook, and there we go. Apply that. It's going to be our new server IP. You should

really make your something easier to remember, like 192.168.1.2 or five or whatever. That's a great way to make sure that you're not taking or attempting to take an IP that's already been used. Once we've done that, it's time to open macOS.

server so we can find it in Launchpad. It opens as a standalone app and it will ask us to continue, which we will press. We agree to give Apple all of our organs and everything that is definitely theirs when we agree to this end user license agreement. Okay, that took a lot longer

than expected before we get into really the cool stuff that this can do. We need to configure it properly and so we are here on the main page. We have MacBooks, MacBook, that's what my device is called. That's pretty terrible, so we're going to

change the host name to let's change it to Home Server maybe or Server, got local. I'm not going to use that one because we actually already use that here at our office, but you could use whatever one you want. We're going to choose to use the

Ethernet network rather than Wi-Fi. We're going to do local network and then we're going to call it Mac Server, that's what we're calling it. Mac Server, okay, and then we press finish and we change the host name of the computer and it's going to change the

name of the computer and the name of the share so that now on all other Macs and our iOS devices and even Windows devices because this is SMB capable, which is pretty cool, which is the Windows file sharing protocol, it will appear as Mac Server and it will be accessible to

every device on our network. Holy smokes, this takes a long time. All right, that took a lot longer than expected. We're going to hit the Settings tab and enable some form of remote access. What does this do? Well, it allows you to remotely access your computer. This is helpful, not

only if you don't have a monitor or keyboard or display because you're using like a Mac Mini or something but even in the case of this MacBook which does have all those things it's nice because then I can just put this up in my attic and

every time I want to change or modify something I don't have to go up there to do it I can just control it from another Mac and so that's exactly what we're going to enable SSH is an option which is great if you use Windows computers

and allows you to access it from really basically any device or Linux device and then there's screen sharing and Apple remote desktop those are natively built into Mac OS so on any Mac there's an app called screen sharing you can find it in spotlight or your utilities folder and

then you can control your server last thing you can enable is Apple push notifications you're going to need an Apple ID and password and then a certificate that's signed to this device but you'll get push notifications on your iOS devices on your phone for example when you know parts of your

server stop working or you have a drive failure or your Time Machine backup stops working really cool stuff that you should probably enable and that's pretty much it now we need to add some users so there's one user installed by default this is called macbook server and the

macbook server account is the administrative account now we can add other accounts and other users which is what you're going to want to do if only because you don't want to run the admin account generally when you're accessing files and stuff like that so you'll want

that's just for your own use, but you can make separate users for every person in your house, for example, so your kids or your spouse or whomever can have access to a different local store on your network so they can store their own files privately, separate from yours.

Pretty nice. So we're going to add a new user just for example's sake. I'm, we're gonna call this account test. We're gonna call the account name test. You can add an email address, you can add a password. We're gonna make the password

test, really secure, and then you can choose whether or not to make them an admin, and where their home folder is going to be stored if they have a home folder at all. So if they don't have a home folder, that means they have no file access other than the main shared

directory. We do want to give each user file access, so we're gonna let them use the local storage, and then we you can also limit how much space they have, so that's kind of handy as well. But that's good, then we're gonna click create now.

What we're not going to do that you probably should do, because this is generally good server hygiene, is to add every user to a group and then you'll modify the group's entire permissions, so what they can access where you generally do that to a group.

But to me, because there's not gonna be that many people using this, I'm just going to do it on a per user basis. I know sysadmins are freaking out, that's okay, I don't care. So we're gonna right-click on this test user and then

We can change edit access to services by default. New users have access to literally everything, and that seems, that's kind of the antithesis to normal servers. Usually, you have no permissions until they're enabled. This is the opposite; you get access to everything.

But you can restrict stuff. So let's say I don't want my test server having SSH access or screen sharing access or, you know, messaging access or whatever, and so I can disable those. Press okay, and then I manage, and then that allows me to do that.

So once we've created groups and users, we can actually enable our services and choose what users have access to each service. Now there are a lot of services on here, and I'm really only going to talk about the ones that I think normal people are going to use in their home. If

there are some pretty cool ones that do really advanced stuff, but generally, you just, you don't need them. The first one is Time Machine. Time Machine is cool, and everyone probably uses Time Machine. You plug a hard drive into your Mac, it automatically backs stuff up. Super handy

and nice. There used to be a product that Apple made called Time Capsule. It was a Wi-Fi router with a Time Machine hard drive built in. That's gone now. Apple doesn't sell that, but you can mimic that exact same functionality using Mac OS Server. So what it allows all of my

computers to do is backup over the network to one local storage device. This means you don't need a hard drive plugged into every single computer. You just let them backup over the network to the device that's plugged into your Mac. So I can turn the service

Oh, this is also another weird thing in Mac OS Server, you turn the service on before you can modify them. Normally on other servers, you modify the settings and then turn it on. This is the reverse. So this is a new Time Machine store, and I can choose where to store the backup.

So I'm gonna store them right now just in my desktop. This is not a great spot because it's on my internal hard drive. You generally want to plug in a different device and then back up that way, but I can limit you the size of each

backup. I'm not going to do that, and then I just press create, and it will create a Time Machine store. And what's cool about this is that I can give permissions to some users or all users or certain groups. And so what that allows me to do

is give backup Time Machine permissions to the test account, and so tests can now update their Time Machine back up on their Mac. And so on the Mac, you on a different Mac, you go into system preferences, you enter Time Machine, and then you can actually select this

computer as the Time Machine backup location. This computer handles all the storage. You can actually click backup here once they begin backing up. You can see all the devices that are backing stuff up on your network. You can manage them, you can restore them, you can delete them.

Really, really, really handy to have one shared backup location. Okay, so Time Machine is cool. The next thing that you're probably going to want to use is caching. Caching is frigging sick, and I it's a little difficult to display to explain. We're gonna turn this on, it's

enabled automatically by or it's not enabled by default but it's configured automatically and there's not really anything you can do to change it but what this does is it works with iTunes the App Store and iOS updates to automatically cache those files so every

time my phone my iPhone asks for an app update rather than going directly to the Internet it actually goes through my server through this computer first and then it goes to the App Store the App Store says okay you don't have that app update yet let's give that to the server

and then the server stores that app date local are that app update locally on the network and so any other iPhone or iPad device that wants to update that app rather than asking the internet every single time to download it from the App Store which increases the amount of bandwidth that

you use on your home internet plan and that also is slower than locally servicing something from the network is what your local area network is generally much faster than your wide area network downloading from the internet and so you can just automatically serve those app updates to

other devices from this computer once it's been downloaded once it's really cool works for Mac apps - iOS apps as well iOS updates which is pretty neat and yeah it's just generally really awesome it's super handy when you have multiple Macs and they all have an

update the app updates once to this computer and then distributes from there to all the other machines on your network it's fast it saves data it's absolutely wonderful it's caching and you should definitely enable that okay next file sharing file sharing is enabled by default it will appear as the

name of your server on any other Mac and cool, so what exactly can we do? Well, we're going to give permissions to some users or all users, and then when they're connected to private networks, local networks, or all networks, you can open your server up to the Internet so that

if you open the correct port on your router, you can access these files, not even just from your own home network, but from afar, which is pretty cool. And these files app, there is file sharing functionality that integrates to the iOS Files app as well, so not only can you share files between

your Macs, but also from your iOS devices, which is really pretty neat. Now you can choose which folders to share. By default, it is shared: the desktop and the MacBook Servers public folder. So let's say I don't want to share the desktop with people on my right. I'm going to

subtract that, and then this share point may be used for Time Machine backup. So we're just kidding, we're not going to remove that, but we do have this MacBook Servers public folder. So this is a public folder that is accessible by iOS SMB, which is a Windows share; AFP, which is

Apple File Protocol, that's what Mac OS uses; and then you can choose to allow guest users or not. We're going to say no guest users, so you have to log into your account in order to access this. You press OK, and holy smokes, what happens is now on any

other iOS device or any other Mac on our network or Windows computer, you'll see that the Mac OS server appears. You click it, and then it will ask you to log in. You'll need to log in with a user account that has access to that share, and everyone will get access to the

Macbook server's public folder so everyone in your house can share files in between each other, but then you can also have each user have their own individual files that they can access on a file sharing. This is like a local network drive for any device you want in

your house. A really great way to share stuff rather than uploading to Dropbox or iCloud Drive or whatever. On newer versions of Mac OS Server, by the way, you can replicate iCloud Drive functionality as well, so not only does it cache and store on iCloud, but also stores locally

and it won't request that file from iCloud so long as it's on your local computer. Really, really freaking cool. The last thing that, well, normal people are probably going to use is VPN. VPN, if you use one and if you have one, this allows every computer on your network to

go through this device as the networked device, so you can, you can basically add a network-wide VPN to all the computers on your network. Now, most routers now will do this, so I don't know that most people would prefer this method, especially if in the older

Mac with without 10 Gigabit Ethernet or gigabit ethernet functionality, then rather just going through that router, but it is an option as well. And then there's a lot of other crazy stuff like you can create a local wiki. There's not much use for this in a home server

environment, but I've turned the wiki on. It's starting, and this quite literally allows you to open in Safari a Wikipedia style website that is an intranet, so it's accessible from any device on your network. If we open this in Safari, it is the name of your server dot local, so

It's going to open to Mac server dot local. Any device on your network can go there. We are going to accept the certificate, and Macs River dot local is going to show us this wiki, which we can modify and add information to. It's great for

like small businesses if they want to add information on payroll or whatever. It's a pretty slick system there, but that's pretty much wiki functionality. I don't know that most people would use that, and other than that, that's pretty much the extent of what normal

people are going to use. You can do locally hosted messages or mail or contacts or calendars. I would not recommend this now that iCloud is so good. You can also do host a website. So, if you have a website folder or directory and actually host that on the

internet online by enabling that, I generally would not recommend that. But there are a number of other features that are available in Mac OS server. So, poke around, play with it. But at very minimum for $20, this allows you to resurrect an old Mac, and then especially

if you run this in conjunction with something like Plex Media Server or many of the other applications that allow you to use this old computer as a host device, it becomes kind of an end-all be-all of computers on your network. One old computer to rule them all and to

serve all the networks in, or all the computers in, all the land. That was probably one of the lamest endings I've ever done on any video ever. But do you know what? I don't care. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video

please give it a thumbs up if you didn't like it well that other button seems to work okay to let me know what model of Mac you're going to resurrect to become a Mac OS server and as always stay snazzy see you later folks

Turn an OLD Mac into a NEW Server!