Finally found a use for my iBook G4 :/

[quinterro]

About two weeks ago I switched from Roadrunner to U-Verse.  The modem for Roadrunner was in my office, while the modem for U-Verse was in my living room and on the opposite side of the house.

After buying (and returning) and router/range extender/access point I looked at what hardware I had in my office that I could use to get my wired computers and NAS drives online.  At first I tried a Bay Trail computer I had and it worked great with a Ubuntu bootable USB drive.  I had to join the network after each boot but it was straightforward.  However after a while it would try to boot the USB drive and would sit at a blank screen.

I wondered if the iBook could do the same thing.  After trying it out it worked like a charm.  At the moment it is sitting on my bookshelf running Internet Sharing until I get the Bay Trial box working again or buy a different wireless range extender with ethernet connectivity.  I hope I can resolve the issue on the other computer - I miss playing Diablo II on it.

 

[tendim]

I wondered if the iBook could do the same thing.  After trying it out it worked like a charm.  At the moment it is sitting on my bookshelf running Internet Sharing until I get the Bay Trial box working again or buy a different wireless range extender with ethernet connectivity. 

Great to hear a use for an old machine!  My G4 12" is my dedicated film scanner machine because it has builtin FW400 (my Mini only has FW800).  The machine sits nicely on top of the scanner, and I can then mount my main machine and transfer the files over via file sharing. 

 

[quinterro]

While I have the Bay Trail machine working again I may either leave the iBook there or try my Lombard to see if it can handle sharing its connection since either of them would take up less space. So far there doesn't appear to be any lag using the shared connection versus using a USB wi-fi dongle on the desktop.

 

[quinterro]

I reset the BIOS on the Bay trail machine and it now has Ubuntu 14.04 installed and sharing its wifi connection over ethernet.  I tried Linux Mint Mate 17.1 but couldn't find a simple way to do it on that release of Linux.

This evening I have been playing Diablo II on the iBook.   I finally went east!  Woohoo!

On another note one of my NAS drives is so old I can't find any documentation on it.  It is one of those cheap IDE USB/Etheret drive enclosures.  It has a 500GB drive limit, only supports FAT32 (no > 4GB files) and with Windows 7 and 8 you have to FTP into it - going to \\devicename doesn't work.  It looks like it was put out by Speed Dragon, model FG-NAS1-A2.  Their page has a link for drivers and docs but it goes to the product page.  If anyone has one of these let me know how to set it up once it is reset. 

If I can't set up this NAS I may buy either an IDE to SATA adapter or an IDE PCI Express x1 controller card and share the drive from the Ubuntu box.  I would buy another NAS enclosure but they don't really sell IDE ones anymore.

 

[quinterro]

Never mnid.

I found a Newer Technology drive enclosure initially meant for a Mac Mini.  I put the hard drive in there and just accessing it on the Ubuntu box is so much faster than it ever was - even through USB - on the NAS enclosure.  Now to figure out how to share it to Windows and Mac computers.