Wesley's Tool-Box

I've been oscillating between Mac mini and iMac for the past two decades for server use. An iMac 21.5" (2017) took over the job of a Mac mini (2012) for the past five and a half years, and now I'm moving back to Mac mini.

This time, it has an M2 Pro processor that uses the ARM architecture instead of Intel x86. So I took my time in setting everything up from the scratch, which took about three weeks. On the hardware side, I wanted to recreate the integrated look of an iMac, so gathering the necessary components required some time. On the software side, there were some compatibility issues in the server components that needed resolving. Most of them are fixed now, so I moved the server operation to the new system today.

I skipped upgrading the iMac server’s OS to macOS 10.15 Catalina last year mainly due to the removal of 32-bit application support. After a year, the clean-up of obsolete apps was complete, paving the way for the upgrade.

During the preparation, there was a bit of a hiccup with the MySQL database, But putting the data to a new one largely solved the issue and the website ended up loading much quicker. Two minor errors occurred after moving to the new database, which were quickly resolved by editing the configuration file:

1. "Query failed: Out of sort memory, consider increasing server sort buffer size"

Solution: increase sort_buffer_size from the default of 262144

sort_buffer_size=2097152

2. "Query failed: Expression #1 of SELECT list is not in GROUP BY clause and contains nonaggregated column 'blog.multilingual_body.value' which is not functionally dependent on columns in GROUP BY clause; this is incompatible with sql_mode=only_full_group_by"

Solution: remove only_full_group_by in sql_mode

sql_mode=STRICT_TRANS_TABLES, NO_ZERO_IN_DATE, NO_ZERO_DATE, ERROR_FOR_DIVISION_BY_ZERO, NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION

With all the pieces ready I went with the installation of macOS 11.0 Big Sur. It took about an hour and except for a prolonged setup time of the iCloud, things went smoothly.

The venerable Mac mini 2012, which took over the job of the server from the iMac 2008 in February 2013, showed signs of its age two months ago, refusing to boot due to corrupted Fusion Drive. I was able to remedy the problem, but I thought it may be a good time to move over to a new system. Seeing that Apple has not updated Mac mini in three years (and frankly, the 2014 edition was not an upgrade many had hoped for) I decided to return to using an iMac.

The iMac 21.5" 2017 was able to smoothly take over the Mac mini last month, but for some reason the system came equipped with macOS Sierra (10.12) instead of High Sierra (10.13) which was already a month old at the time. So I applied an extra caution and checked carefully that the apps I ran were compatible before manually upgrading. Finally, I made the switch to High Sierra today. It seems everything is functioning as expected.

With major tasks at the workplace wrapped up, I decided that the National Foundation Day holiday would be a good time to upgrade the Mac mini server from El Capitan (OS X 10.11) to Sierra (OS X macOS 10.12). For a warm-up, I upgraded the MySQL Server installation from 5.6 to 5.7 before that, but I ran into some weird issues and took about an hour to resolve. After getting MySQL to work again, I made a full system backup and installed Sierra. With the new OS in place, I restored the server configuration and now you see that the website is back in action. iPhone 7 review will resume shortly.