G3 Server

[Powertrip]

In my Quest for Towers... I acquired a beige G3 server to compliment my 9600s. I found it through LEM swap for a great deal.

G3 Server, 333MHz processor, 512MB RAM, DVDR drive from a G5, SCSI card&drives (still need to verify size).

This machine will possibly become the we server for my fiancé's Perfectly Posh direct sales business. If I use my hobby for stuff she can appreciate, she is more tolerant of my Mac Acquisition Syndrome.

 

[IPalindromeI]

It's a neat machine, but I might not trust it as a daily use server. There's caps and disks to worry about, and software is a whole other kettle of fish. What kind of server do you plan to use it for?

 

[Schmoburger]

Nice score... a beige tower is next on my list of things to procure after a 9600 actually

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

I actually didn't know this machine existed before today.

 

[Schmoburger]

I actually didn't know this machine existed before today.

Yes the early G3 Servers are not a terribly well-extolled machine... in fact I guess the same can be said for most of the beige G3's. Good for prices, but not so good in that a lot get thrown straight in a dumpster so not terribly easy to get hold of.

 

[johnklos]

It's a neat machine, but I might not trust it as a daily use server. There's caps and disks to worry about, and software is a whole other kettle of fish. What kind of server do you plan to use it for?

As someone who's run a PowerMac 9600 as a server continuously for more than a decade, I'd say that when you have higher quality hardware, it lasts longer, generally speaking. Apple overengineered their machines in the late 1990s.

I agree about the disks - I always use new disks and some kind of mirror or RAID (where the "R" means redundant - striping is not RAID).

 

[Powertrip]

It's a neat machine, but I might not trust it as a daily use server. There's caps and disks to worry about, and software is a whole other kettle of fish. What kind of server do you plan to use it for?

It will host a low traffic website, most likely running Wordpress as a content management system.

 

[IPalindromeI]

It'll likely run a modern Linux or BSD just fine. Debian is probably the best bet. OpenBSD is the best BSD on PPC Macs IMHO, but it requires a New World machine. Make sure you maintain WordPress with updates - it's the most popular web software to exploit.

 

[Powertrip]

Thanks for the heads up. I'm hoping to run a version of OSX Server, so instead I'll look into Apache and managing the content myself.

 

[IPalindromeI]

OS X 10.5 isn't patched, so have that too. If you want to use it as an internet-facing server, it's basically going to be Linux/BSD or nothing.

 

[Elfen]

I would talk to JohnKlos about setting it up as a web server under BSD UNIX. I've seen his work and he created one for me out of an old Motorola Star Max I found with a G3 card in it many years ago. It was incredibly fast!

Or you can run WebTen by Tenon, which gives you a UNIX Layer running on top of OS8/OS9 with APP (Apache/Perl/PHP). It was one of the first server set ups I created for the (long since defunct) BizInfo Plus Business Search Engine. It was quite fast and managed to survive a massive attack in '05 that took down the ISP NYCWebs (they were 99% Windows servers) when the ILuvYou virus hit them... LOL!

Either way I would recommend a separate drive/RAID for OS and Web Documents. If you can - use SSDs, even if it is just one have it on the Web Docs. You want your I/O to be fast, even with a low to moderate traffic site. You want your Web <-> DataBase ==> User requests to be as fast as you can get it.

Also - MAX THE RAM!

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

Also - MAX THE RAM!

That applies to about every computer ever manufactured.

 

[IPalindromeI]

Is MachTen still supported? My suggestion of Debian on Old World G3s stands. OpenBSD, the best BSD on PPC is New World only. NetBSD is a possibility, but I've found while it might support more architectures, it does so poorly.

 

[Cory5412]

The Blue-and-White G3s are nice machines for desktop productivity with Mac OS 8 and 9. I have either a 333 or 366 in my storage locker and it's a nice, solid machine from the time. It's definitely on my list of machines to pull back out and set up with a nice display at some point, to just use with Mac OS 9 software.

A beige G3 server would also make a great ASIP5/ASIP6 machine, or if you had some need for the Mac OS 9 management functionality of the original "Mac OS X Server 1.x," that release.

Unfortunately, I can't imagine WordPress will be anything other than really slow and painful on a 333MHz G3 with an old IDE or SCSI-2 disk for storage, even if you do get 768 megabytes of memory in it. Adding faster storage will help, but those PHP web applications are just going to be a real hog on CPU resources.

For comparison, I was running mediawiki (x2), wordpress, and the old phpBB version of this site on 256 megs of ram and I rarely swapped, but it's also got access to four modern Xeon cores, so the speed was never the issue.

On, say, a 1.3GHz Pentium M with 768 megs of ram, the same configuration is "acceptable" -- I wouldn't go much slower for that type of task.

333MHz should be fine for hosting static HTML files and doing light shell-box work, IRSSI, alpine, vim or nano, and that kind of thing.

Also, consider this another vote for using BSD or Linux for that task. Mac OS X 10.5 has a lot of security problems today, which are technically resolvable, but it's going to be an untenable uphill battle, and if you're not already an accomplished UNIX/Linux system administrator and/or programmer, you're going to end up spending a lot more time on it than I think you're ready to, especially given that it's a Mac, and that sets certain expectations.

 

[Cory5412]

EDIT: I had meant to write Beige G3s, I don't know why I wrote blue-and-white.

I have both a beige at either 333 or 366, and a blue-and-white (but with a PCI Power Macintosh G4 board, for fixed IDE goodness) at 450, but my commentary above was about the beige.

During its lifetime, I mostly used the blue-and-white with Mac OS X, but that system is also good at Mac OS 9.

 

[Powertrip]

Thanks, everyone. I shall mull over everything and rethink my battle plan!

 

[Cory5412]

Let us know how it goes! It's a great machine and it would be absolutely tops if you were just hosting plain HTML files with AppleShare IP 6 (there's almost nothing to compromise in system 9) or if you were doing it to mess with Mac OS 9 networking, and it would make a great bridge file server.

Mac OS X is both going to be very slow compared to a minimalistic linux or BSD installation, and be very problematic, security-wise, for a public web server, especially with PHP/SQL and friends.

 

[johnklos]

I agree with what's written here - you could get a G4 upgrade and install Leopard, which is a pain but doable, then you could compile Apache, PHP and friends from scratch so they don't have ridiculous numbers of insecurities (I'm looking at you, PHP), but all that work is most likely not worth the effort.

OpenBSD and NetBSD aren't very different, but the fact that OpenBSD only supports New World machines is a problem.

NetBSD newer than NetBSD 5 (which is still patched and updated, to be clear) has issues on large cache G4s. I wish I had more time and a local machine to work on this, but I don't at the moment. But NetBSD 7 will be out shortly, and a G3 wouldn't have any problems with it.

PHP is slow as all heck. Wordpress is the Java and Flash of the blog world. It's a mess. I HIGHLY recommend keeping a staging site and public site both up and running at all times so you can update Wordpress in your staging site whenever there's an update, and so long as it doesn't break anything, update on your live site immediately thereafter. I've known way too many people who just leave their sites running insecure Wordpress because they're afraid an update will break something. But people don't understand computer security - a non-working site is MUCH more desirable than a site controlled by a malicious party.

I also recommend following these simple rules that Wordpress people would never want you to follow:

Never allow uploads to directories which are executable.

Never allow execution in directories to which files can be uploaded.

If you do this, you'll be much more secure than a default Wordpress installation. However, installation and Wordpress-based upgrades won't work. What I do for my clients is I give them two shell scripts to run - one makes the site insecure so they can install a plugin, then the other restores the more secure state.

Also, I don't bother with Wordpress-based upgrades - I do all that from the command line because it's really easy to make a backup of all the files, install the new Wordpress files, the copy the site-specific files in place with a script.

Furthermore, the FTP method of local filesystem access is one of the most asinine, bullshit insecurities EVER. It's so incredibly stupid that one might think that people who make money from phishing are the ones who suggested it. Yes, let's use the database, which is accessible whenever there's a vulnerability, to store the username and password of the owner of the site! Yes, let's leave insecure, plaintext FTP open for regular users (it doesn't matter that access is over localhost - FTP should never be on for regular users).

I should really write up a how-to because Wordpress insecurity really bugs me, in case you can't tell

 

[IPalindromeI]

Or just run static files - but this being for actual use and not some retro personal fun, you'll have to do design manually and that's effort. There's some other alternatives too, some of which take simple pages and spit formatting and templates on a static site. You can also just buy a new Windows server and run SharePoint.