Snow Leopard Server

[scarified]

I'm really new to mac products, being completely honest I don't have any yet (unless my ipod counts), but, I'm planning to buy a macbook pro and a mac mini (not sure about the mac mini yet)
The reason I'm not sure about the mac mini, is because I would like to use it like a home server... this includes, mail, web server, ftp server, ssh etc.. etc..
The only reason I'm planning to buy this is because the UI is really really nice, and it can run the adobe suite if I need to. (I know it's strange to have a server, with a lot of services and run photoshop in it, but that's what I want )
How are the "wizards" provided by snow leopard server? Can I do all of the things I currently do in CentOS, I know that Mac OS is Unix based so I'm guessing I can. Default Security? Security Patches? Firewall?, Will it be stable? Will it be reliable? Can I have a mac mini running 24/7 and rebooting it twice a year?
Thank you!

 

[ashameer]

Yes you can, actually I´m doing just this, running a Mac Mini as a Server for my small business. You´ll need some experience in setting up a server, but as you seem to have it. Have fun!

 

[garybUK]

Most of what OSX Server's networking services are made up from are the same on a lot of *BSD & Linux distro's, like ISC-DHCPD, Apache, FTPD, Samba etc etc, the only main difference is their implementation of OpenLDAP is somewhat quirky and Apple-ified to make it work a bit more like Microsoft's Activedirectory.

The Wizards, from my pov can be a total pain.... but i'm used to editing configs directly on FreeBSD distributions, other than that it's very stable and pretty simple to set up.