Can I use another computer as a external harddrive for time machine?

I have a mac mini from a few years ago and it is never used. I was wonder if it could be used as an external hard drive for time machine. If this can be done how do I go about setting it up for this type of useage?

Thanks for your reply. I looked at the Troubleshooting, but can't find my exact problem. It is as follows:
I use a new iMac running Snow Leopard with a 500 GB external WD drive.
-I looked the other day to find that time machine had failed, and when I looked at the backups, there had not been a successful backup since September 2009. I think this is when I installed Snow Leopard...
-I went to run a backup, and it failed, saying I did not have room (I have about 220 GB to backup)
-I decided to format the external hard drive and try again from scratch.
-I began getting an error 11, and specifically -8062 and -36 (as examples) which specifically list files that it could not copy.
-I reinstalled snow leopard from disk.
-I excluded time machine from spotlight as recommended in some forums
-I started ommitting some of the files that were listed as not being bale to copy, but now its into my music, and that's half the reason I back up.
I am now backing up to laptop as above post, and if that works, I will conclude that the External HD has seen its day.
If I get the same errors, I will conclude (nervously) that my computer has issues.
Here is an example of an error message:
Error: (-8062) SrcErr:NO Copying /Users/Shared/Music/Compilations/(album name)/(song name).mp3 to /Volumes/Time Machine 20100504/Backups.backupdb/Riskin's Computer/2010-05-04-222232.inprogress/F9243DA..(many letters and numbers)...D19/Macintosh HD/Users/Shared/Music/Compilations/(album name)/(song name)
then below in another message says:
Copy stage failed with error: 11
Backup failed with error: 11
I get this same original error with different files, and with different error numbers.
Apple support told me that by formatting external drive, and reinstalling snow leopard, they were 99.9% sure it would be fixed, but it is not.
Frustrated,

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