B&W G3 As a Server

[cjtmacclassic]

I've got a Gateway with Ubuntu, a Gateway with Vista, and an MBP. I want to use a B&W G3 As a file storage/print server. Would it be suitable for these tasks? I need some type of unifier to well...Unify all my computers!

 

[Cory5412]

Although you could definitely put linux, OS X Server (10.x preferrable, for both samba/SMB and applefile/AFP) or OS + ASIP on the b/w G3, I'd say to consider doing an apt-get install netatalk on the Ubuntu machine, and of course setting up Samba sharing. This will let both your MBP, your Windows PC and your older appletalk-over-ethernet Macs talk to the linux computer and you can store files there. It's what I did for awhile with a small old PIII laptop running Debian 5 Lenny.

The biggest concern is how much storage you can stuff inside it, and the b/w G3 could take a SATA card which would mean "any modern disks."

 

[Dog Cow]

The biggest concern is how much storage you can stuff inside it, and the b/w G3 could take a SATA card which would mean "any modern disks."

Seeing as how the disk controller is 10 years old, you'd definitely want to add a newer controller card. I think that the max that you can get on the Rev. 2 without an add-on is two 128 GB disks for 256 GB total storage. The G3 at my parents' house currently has 120 GB of storage, with one 80 GB disk, and one 40 GB.

 

[Gorgonops]

I'd second the suggestion that you might want to consider using an x86 Intel box (the cheapest rotgut machine you can find that takes SATA drives would do if you don't want to use your existing Linux machine) as a Linux/NetaTalk/Samba server instead of the B&W. A B&W will adequately perform basic server functions if you slap an old version of OS X Server on it but of course if you want to be legal an OS X Server license is expensive, a B&W has those disk size limitations, and the versions of OS X Server which support acting as a Time Machine target for your MBP (Leopard or better) won't run on a B&W. (Netatalk was recently updated to support Time Machine.)

If you were to install Linux on the B&W you *may* be able to break the PATA drive size limitation, but don't quote me on that. (I've found on x86 machines Linux can work around most BIOS limitations including the 128GB limit by probing the hard disk directly and asking for its geometry. Linux of course substitutes its own LBA48 compliant driver for the BIOS one so the hardware isn't a problem. The only limitation you're then stuck with is you have to have a boot partition that resides entirely within the BIOS-supported hard disk space.) I've never run a gigantic IDE hard disk with PPC Linux and some of the Google hits I've seen imply that on Macs Linux depends on Open Firmware to get the drive size correct.

 

[Christopher]

you could get two 120GB hard drives if you did not want to buy a SATA card and do a Striped RAID so you have a single 240GB drive.

What I did with my quicksilver G4(because I was young and poor at the time) is take out both the zip and dvd drive replaced them with PATA drives instead. From memory you have to assign the hard drives jumpers, the zip is Slave and the dvd drive is master.

When I wanted to upgrade the g4 to leopard, I cleared off a hard drive and cloned an OS X iso to the drive and booted from that.

Of course, this is banking on you not need an optical drive, or if you have an external instead.

 

[Cory5412]

If you're building a file server, the capacity and performance benefits you will get from doing a RAID-0 (striping only) with any number of disks will not be worthwhile, as what will happen is one of the disks will die and all of your data will be gone.

If you can afford it, a mirrored pair of bigger disks would be far better.

Also, a device like the drobo or a readynas or a computer installed with a self-maintaining filesystem like opensolaris/solaris11express with ZFS will do sort of an in-software RAID 5 that's purported to work very well.

Although for anybody on a budget, two drives mirrored will probably be the best thing, or striping but with an automatic backup to another drive, nightly.