I had to install a Mac mini Server today and couldn’t get a spare monitor to plug it in to for the installer.

In the past, I’m sure I’ve been able to use Apple Remote Desktop to connect to it via screen sharing and it’s all been good. For some reason, it wasn’t available to be managed via ARD so I had to dig a bit deeper.

I wanted to configure the two 500 GB disks as a RAID1 mirror, and for this the Server Assistant wasn’t up to the task.

After booting off the Mac OS X Server installation disc, I was able to ssh into the server using it’s IP address (discovered in Server Assistant) and the first 8 digits of it’s serial number (case sensitive, any letters are in CAPS).

From there it was pretty easy to mirror the disks:

diskutil appleRAID create mirror ServerRAID JHFS+ /dev/disk0 /dev/disk1

This erased the entirety of both disks, created an AppleRAID set as a mirror with disk0 and disk1, formatted it as Journaled HFS+ and named it ServerRAID.

From there I was then able to use Server Assistant on my laptop to go through the standard OS X Server installation, completely headless.

Done and donner.