Mac OS X Server at home

[Trekkie]

Hola.

I've been converted to the mac faithful and I have one thing left in my home that I would like to move to the mac platform when I'm read to upgrade, and I'm having a hard time finding everything I need.

Right now I have a Dual P3 1.0GHz system in my garage with 4x120GB Drives that are RAID5 with an Adaptec 2400A controller running linux. They are backed up to a DLT SCSI tape drive.

These hold all my photos, and my music. I back them up about once a month or so. I've been trying to figure out how to get the drives, and the tape drive into a firewire enclosure or something along those lines.

I've found hard drive enclosures. But unfortunately it seems that if you want more than two drives in an enclosure you must want hot swapping, RAID embedded, and a big price tag.

I can't seem to find a way to hook a DLT SCSI drive to a Firewire/USB equipped Mac. Does anyone know of a Firewire enclosure with a SCSI interface that would hold a 5.25" Full height device?

My ideal is to find a PowerMac G4 Dual of some mid level speed (500 - 800 MHz) semi-inexpensively and then either install the drives internally/externally. But backing them up is my 100% concern. The music I can always re-rip but I went full digital with a Canon D60 back in 2002 and I've got pictures from my family on there to the tune of 60 - 70 GB of space. Both my kids births, the last pictures of my daughter with her great grandfather, things like that. So I'd really like to make sure I can back them up.

Of course I'd want to run Mac OS X server more for my edumacation purposes but I'd also like to do something like a roaming home directory and have a login for my daughter so that she can't destroy the desktop like she did the other day when she wanted to 'click the mouse'

Any ideas?

 

[Jo-Kun]

Hi,

if you get a G4 you can hook your drives internally

maybe get 2 of these (no hotswap 2 drives per enclosure) http://www.wiebetech.com/products/DuoGB800.html

its FireWire800 so they will get the max out of your drives and you can upgrade to 400gb/drive max (800GB per box)

in either way you can soft-raid them in OSX...

about scsi: if you get a MDD you can install it internally (and make something to open te door to access the drive, less beautiful... but it works) and add a SCSI controller... or add the controller and get a SCSI enclosure... about SCSI->FireWire... I really have no idea...

 

[varmit]

G4 case is good

If you can see, I have 3 hard drives, they lay across the bottom. And There is room for one more ontop of the one that are in there (picture on the right shows bracket for another hard drive). I have a ATA card (yellow ribbons), not SCSI, but it works just the same.

 

[Trekkie]

Cool. Thanks for the ideas.

 

[Jo-Kun]

about SCSI to FireWire: http://www.meritline.com/ulscsifircon.html

and about varmit's pictures: that's when you get a G4 ;-) but one reminder: not all the channels inside a G4 are ATA100, one is 100 and one is 66 so you'll need an extra ATA100 or 133 adaptor to be able to use your drives at their normal transferspeeds...

grts

Jo

 

[jhu]

i don't quite understand why you need to switch. is there a problem backing up your files that are on the mac? it would seem to be less hassle/resources to send files from your mac --> linux --> tape

 

[Trekkie]

Red Hat dropped support for the OS versions that I purchased. I can't afford their 'enterprise' version and the RAID adapter I have isn't supported on any other linux distribution that I can tell.

Since I can't seem to find bug fixes/patches or what not without going to fedora core which I can't tell if the card supports or not, I'm debating dumping the system in favor of something new.

Plus I like the ease of managability that Mac OS X Server seems to offer from everything I've read. I'd like to do a few things with it and I need a mac to run it.

 

[jhu]

what kind of raid adaptor is it? i'm surprised that it's not supported in other distributions since the driver should be supported by the kernel, unless it's a binary-only driver.

if you move to a mac, i assume you'd be getting a new raid adaptor?

 

[Trekkie]

It is the adaptec 2400a. Of course now i have bigger problems. The last power surge we had during a storm apparently damaged some things. At first only one drive wasn't working, and I had to run a fsck to try and recover teh /boot partition.

But b y the time the evening was over I had two dead drives making thunking noises. So now I've lost all data and have to mail off two drives to get them fixed under warranty

Oh well, tape backup was good as of 4/11. Lost a few things though.

 

[jhu]

that adaptec card should work with any linux distribution. just download the driver from adaptec's site. although you may want someone with some raid + linux experience answering any further questions.

 

[Trekkie]

Actually, no, you can't just download the driver from Adaptec - if you want to use a distro released since RH 7.0.

Adaptec's linux driver support on this card sucks rocks. I can't recommend against adaptec at all when it comes to RAID cards. I should have spent a little extra and got a 3ware card.

I don't need anyone's help on the RAID array stuff, I've only been doing them on SCSI and Fibre Channel since 1994 or so. Got a wee bit of experience with them, was just wanting tod o something on Mac OS X