• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

My Power Macintosh 9500 Server

morgant

Active member
I recently searched out a Power Macintosh 9500 (ended up with 17 other Gw & G4 freebies as well) for various bootstrapping projects and have it online as a web server using AppleShare IP 6.1.1:

http://buuto.makkintosshu.com/

What do you all think? Suggestions?

I'd like to toss some more RAM in there and interleave it, but that'll have to wait "extra" cash. The only pie-in-the-sky modification I'm dreaming of is to use CF or maybe a PCI SATA card & small SSD drive for the boot volume.

I'm also waiting for a couple older versions of BBEdit to arrive and then I'll be installing Newton dev tools on it.

 

Temetka

Well-known member
Nice looking little page you got there.

I hope to do something along the same lines with my 8500 when I am finished restoring it to its former glory.

Does there exist a KVM that will work with PC and Mac via USB / ADB?

Oh and I really like that Rebound device of yours. How good does it actually function?

 

morgant

Active member
Does there exist a KVM that will work with PC and Mac via USB / ADB?
I'm not aware of one that supports USB & ADB, but maybe somebody else knows. I wouldn't be surprised if there was such a beast around the time of the 1st PowerMac G4 introduction, but I never saw one and it's probably not worth looking for.

You can definitely use most USB & VGA KVM switches on both Macs & PCs. I use some old IOGEAR stuff in my office server room. If you toss a USB card in your Mac and really want to use an ADB keyboard, mouse, etc., then I'd suggest picking up a Griffin Technology iMate so you can use ADB gear over USB. I've had one for years that I use with my Apple Adjustable Keyboard and it works great.

Oh and I really like that Rebound device of yours. How good does it actually function?
The Rebound! functions very well. I'm actively using OT/SNMP on the 9500 server so I can monitor and graph its network performance, which has some very nasty memory leaks, and the Rebound! happily reboots it about once a day when it detects it's not responding correctly anymore.

 

beachycove

Well-known member
I notice it's been down for a day or so. However:

Can you explain the nature of the memory leak? I run an ASIP 6.3 server for my own uses on an 8600/300 (604ev), and used to have ASIP 6.2 on a 9500/200. In the case of ASIP 6.2 in particular, regular reboots were definitely needed; as for my current ASIP 6.3 server, I only run the thing for several hours a day, so I can't really report on its stability running 24/7.

I have read before about the ASIP memory leak as a potential problem, but have never understood what a 'memory leak' under the MacOS actually is. I would be very interested to know.

The 8600/300, by the way, is much more responsive as a file server than was the 9500, particularly via remote connections over TCP/IP.

 

Charlieman

Well-known member
Has anyone personally ever got a noticeable benefit from DIMM interleaving on PCI PowerMacs? My 9600/G4 450 is a temperamental beast that took a while to get in hand, and installing a batch of matched memory from OWC definitely improved things. It now has a massive 768MB (enough RAM to do most things, not too big to hit OS limitations) and is relatively stable. Working out which slot to use for each particular PCI card is a long job with six slots...

 

morgant

Active member
I notice it's been down for a day or so. However:
Oops, my bad. I restarted it Saturday morning and it appears to have been up since. I futzed with the ADB chain live a few days ago and that probably threw off the Rebound!

Can you explain the nature of the memory leak? I run an ASIP 6.3 server for my own uses on an 8600/300 (604ev), and used to have ASIP 6.2 on a 9500/200. In the case of ASIP 6.2 in particular, regular reboots were definitely needed; as for my current ASIP 6.3 server, I only run the thing for several hours a day, so I can't really report on its stability running 24/7.
I have read before about the ASIP memory leak as a potential problem, but have never understood what a 'memory leak' under the MacOS actually is. I would be very interested to know.
My memory leak is actually related to using the OT/SNMP extension which allows me to poll SNMP values (network, CPU, etc.) from the likes of MRTG. It is well known to have some nasty leaks. In fact, the box was very stable before I started polling it every 5 minutes with MRTG.

On all platforms, memory leaks are when you don't clean up old variables that are no longer needed when you're done with them. Eventually, you run out of free space in the memory space allocated to your application. More modern programming languages and runtime environments support stuff like automatic garbage collection to help developers with that task, but on the Mac OS it's all manual. Of course, other operating systems also have advanced memory protection so accessing memory outside your application's memory space (which, if you've accidentally filled yours up due to a memory leak, is more likely you'll accidentally do) won't crash anything but your app, but that can cause multiple apps or the whole system to crash under the Mac OS.

Mac OS X, being based on UNIX, has memory protection and if a developer is using Cocoa/Objective-C or Java they also have access to various types of garbage collection. Although, developers that use the oldschool Carbon APIs, they don't get garbage collection.

The 8600/300, by the way, is much more responsive as a file server than was the 9500, particularly via remote connections over TCP/IP.
What do you attribute that to? The bigger L1 & L2 caches on the 604e & 604ev? The faster processor speed? I'd assume that you had the 50MHz bus speed in the 9500 if it was a stock 200MHz, so that'd be the same between the two models.

I only today was able to track down the AppleShare IP 6.2 updates (they're in "English-International", not "English-North_American" and not listed anywhere on Apple's support knowledge base that I can find), so I'll update to that since that's what's recomended under Mac OS 8.6. That may help increase stability, but I still attribute it to OT/SNMP.

 

beachycove

Well-known member
Thanks for the clear explanation.

What do you attribute that to? The bigger L1 & L2 caches on the 604e & 604ev? The faster processor speed? I'd assume that you had the 50MHz bus speed in the 9500 if it was a stock 200MHz, so that'd be the same between the two models.
A 604ev is a rather different as well as a faster processor than a 604e (even more the 604), and the 1MB inline L2 cache in the 8600/ 9600 "Kansas" architecture is much superior to the 512k cache on the 9500's logic board. The last of the 8600 and 9600 machines were very capable for their time, though the bus speed was indeed 50MHz max.

When the G3 server was first announced, Apple promoted them as much more responsive for file serving than the older 604e machines. I doubt, however, that an early G3 had much to commend it above a 604ev in a server. The greater advantage might have been the G3's bus speed, as it would presumably speed up I/O etc.

 

morgant

Active member
It's been a while, but figured I'd follow up on the stability front:

The AppleShare IP 6.2 updates did not improve stability. Neither did stopping MRTG from polling SNMP (in hopes of limiting OT/SNMP memory leak, if that's the issue). I've gone so far as to completely disable all the OT/SNMP extensions at this point (so no possibility of an OT/SNMP memory leak), with no improvement.

At this point, I can only assume that it's actually an AppleShare IP issue. I have Sysmon pinging the box, sending an a packet to TCP port 548 (AFP), and loading each of the two web sites it hosts (http://buuto.makkintosshu.com/ & http://mausoleum.makkintosshu.com/) every minute for outage notification. Sysmon is likely very crude with its TCP test, so that may be a problem, but I'd assume that AppleShare IP's web server should be able to handle the load of two page loads per minute.

I'll probably need to reassess my Rebound! settings, but I'd also like significantly increase the amount of RAM (from the current 144MB). I may, at some point, give MacHTTP a go to see if that improves stability. I have a number of different WebStar install discs, but, alas, no serial numbers.

At least it takes care of itself, thanks to the Rebound!

Update: BTW - Anyone know of a simple, free uptime utility that'll run under Mac OS 8.6?

 

wthww

Computer Janitor
Staff member
I have to say my 9500 was a champ while it was my server boxen. Sadly its dead according to Dog Cow :( . I'll loved the hostname I gave it too, "stoplock". Admittedly I ran Linux on it, but it ran very well.

//wthww

 

johnklos

Well-known member
Nice!

I've been interested in finding an ADB device which'll start a Mac the moment that power is applied. I have a PowerMac 9600 colocated on a remotely controllable PDU, and while it has never locked up, if it does the PDU would do little good - I can turn it off, but I can't turn it back on remotely. Perhaps someone can figure out how to program the Macintosh PMU from NetBSD to auto-power back on when power is lost...

 

johnklos

Well-known member
I have to say my 9500 was a champ while it was my server boxen. Sadly its dead according to Dog Cow :( . I'll loved the hostname I gave it too, "stoplock". Admittedly I ran Linux on it, but it ran very well.
What happened to it? Do you need parts?

 

noidentity

Well-known member
I believe the old Macs allowed you to press the power switch in and turn it. On my PowerMac 8500, you can't do that, but in the Energy Saver control panel in Advanced Settings there is a checkbox, "Restart automatically after a power failure", which I believe is what you want. Not exactly the most logical place for it, but whatever. :)

 

johnklos

Well-known member
I believe the old Macs allowed you to press the power switch in and turn it. On my PowerMac 8500, you can't do that, but in the Energy Saver control panel in Advanced Settings there is a checkbox, "Restart automatically after a power failure", which I believe is what you want. Not exactly the most logical place for it, but whatever. :)
Yes, the older machines had a turn-in power button, which would be nice. The issue with my machine is that I'm running NetBSD, so I don't have an Energy Saver control panel. Ideally, I'd be able to program the same thing into the Mac PMU, but I don't have the documentation to allow me to do that...

 

noidentity

Well-known member
You could boot into Mac OS to set that option, then boot back into NetBSD. As long as the latter doesn't change PRAM, it'll stick. If it does, you could determine what needs to be set in PRAM in Mac OS (save two copies, one with it set and one clear, and compare in Hex Edit), then set that in NetBSD.

Hmmm, doesn't seem to alter PRAM on my machine. Maybe it's that other NVRAM that is separate. Argh.

 

wthww

Computer Janitor
Staff member
Oh, no I dont need parts. I gave it to dog cow some time ago now. I've moved on to better server boxen :)

//wthww

 

morgant

Active member
Mac Uptime PPC 1.210 has been exactly the solution I was looking for. It's nice to be able to turn on the monitor or connect via VNC to see how long it's been up.

Today I put together an AppleScript ACGI (since Mac Uptime PPC is scriptable) and some Ajax to insert the uptime (and update every 60 seconds) in http://buuto.makkintosshu.com/. Check it out, if you're interested.

 
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