I recently purchased a Mac Studio to replace my ancient Trashcan Mac (work in post audio, it’s a Pro Tools world, so no Linux options unfortunately).

The Trashcan has basically no resale value, and is already capped out on OS updates.

Specs are:

-10 core E5 Xenon (I forget the clock speed, and it’s unplugged atm)

-64GB ram

-512GB SSD (NVMe PCIe 3.1 x4)

-Dual D500 (whatever that is) graphics card(s)

https://www.apple.com/ae/mac-pro-2013/specs/

My thought is to repurpose it either as a hardware firewall since it has two enet ports, or NAS - ideally running headless, and would be able to be admin’d by the other Macs in the house.

My last Linux experience was Gentoo in 2004, and Slackware before that. I’m not afraid of CLI, but it’s been 20 years, so what little I remember is probably completely outmoded in 2023.

Any advice for distros that would work for this use case?

Thanks!

  • @[email protected]English
    20•1 year ago

    Obligatory: Debian.

    But I’d be tempted to put Proxmox on it and then run containers for each function. Then you get purpose-crafted solutions for each use case, but can easily plug new functions in or shut them down based on what you decide later.

    • 6xpipe_English
      11•1 year ago

      I agree with Proxmox. I know it’s 10 years old, but it seems a waste to use a 10 core, 64GB machine as a firewall.

      Actually…put Proxmox on it and put the firewall in a LXC container.

    • @[email protected]English
      4•1 year ago

      I’d second this. I’ve installed Proxmox installed on some Mac Minis and they do a credible job of it. A beefy Max Pro would be all the better.

      I’ll add that if the main purpose is to be a NAS something like TrueNAS will be much more set-and-forget.

      This is grossly overpowered for a firewall, so I wouldn’t go that route unless you want to do a virtual firewall on top of a general purpose hypervisor.