I had been planning to buy a Mac Mini for a while now. I wanted to turn it into a web application server. I was going to install Gentoo on it and drop it somewhere/anywhwere in the house. These plans came to fruition 3 weeks ago when I dropped by the Apple store.
I took my time and configured everything just the way I like it. I rebooted it a few times to check that all services just started by themselves. When I brought it to the living room and pressed the ON button, I sat back in the couch and kept an eye on a “ping” to see how long it would take to boot up. The ping never was answered.
I brought the monitor and the keyboard to the living room (read: hassle) and booted the Mini. It booted without problems. I took out the keyboard and rebooted: no problem. I took out the screen and rebooted: no dice.
I knew the answer before google came back: the Mac Mini was never designed to run headless—the firmware wants a monitor.
This is not for the faith of heart but I found a few links with the same solution: a VGA dummy.
I resisted the idea at first, I knew my soldering skills were not excellent. I had never understood the explanations from the books I had read. I recruited youtube on this one, here are the good videos I found:
“how to solder”
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NU2ruzyc4&NR=1
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLfXXRfRIzY
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dkragEKSKI
How did we ever get anything done before the Internet?
The soldering itself is a long story: wrong solder, bad soldering iron, soldering cup technique and all. I managed to get it done, however.
Then came the moment of truth. I held my breath and closed my eyes and pressed ON again. Imagine the sweat rolling down my face as I waited to see if it would burst into flames OR have ping print “64 bytes from 192.168.0.112: icmp_seq=141 ttl=64 time=1.255 ms”.
Yes, it worked.
Hrm – I suspect this is gentoo and not a firmware thing. Reason being – I have a couple of mac minis (an old powerpc one and a new intel one) that I run headless all the time, running OS X, and access them via VNC.
Nice hardware hack though. Never underestimate what a man with a soldering iron and the skills to use it can do.
Sometimes using this dummy VGA with a server like an Apples XServe – in my case – might help also with performance and some other tricks.
A headless XServe like many other Macs will start up in a mode with the software renderer ON and the hardware renderer OFF – which means that a part of Apples display engine will see no hardware acceleration in certain cases.
For most cases not relevant for a server – but here we go VNC – with a display or dummy attached you get the ability to connect via VNC from that server to any other networked computers.
Without the hardware renderer being ON the VNC screen will just show a white rectangle.
There are many cases where you might connect to your server from remote but have no direct connection into the network, e.g. when you connect via VPN from anywhere in the world to your server.
In some circumstances that saved my day. I was able to connect to my server back in the office via VPN, started a VNC session from the server to my desktop Mac and looked if my desktop Mac was on and had the data that was corrupt on my USB stick.
As I had no direct connection to my desktop Mac I used my VNC over VPN connection to the XServe, accessed my desktop Mac from the server by means of AFP, copied the data to the XServe and copied it back from there by means of AFP over VPN to my PowerBook.
I was able to present my charts and convince some higher ranks ;-)
All made possible by the tiny dummy.
Without it I wouldn’t had a chance to VNC from XServe to desktop Mac. Complicated, isn’t it ? :-))
Then I