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NEW G5 Xserve 2.0 on the bay

bunnspecial said:
The trunk open button on my remote sits "high" and it often inadvertently gets pushed in my pocket-sometimes at inopportune times.

In this particular case, I had apparently hit it somewhere in the process of getting the keys out of my pocket. When this happens, the trunk doesn't actually open all the way, but just pops up a little bit. Vibration from driving will usually open it up all the way.

Generally, it's not a problem, as I can just pull over and shut it. I don't normally have a stack of servers in the trunk :rolleyes:

I also managed to miss the warning on the instrument panel about the trunk being ajar in this case, as I was trying to make sure the servers stacked in the back seat(I had a bunch of these things at the time) were secure.
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"Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire" and you mash the pedal to the floor. BANG! What was that? OH CRUD THE SERVER IS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD! Son of a Bunn Special!
 
Altemose said:
"Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire" and you mash the pedal to the floor. BANG! What was that? OH CRUD THE SERVER IS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD! Son of a Bunn Special!
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Something like that :)

I'd actually pulled away(gently :) ) from a light on campus, glanced in my rear view and saw the deck lid all the way up, then looked in the side view and saw a server laying on the ground.

Thanks to the idiotic way things are laid out on that part of campus, I was only able to pull over and shut the trunk, but had to drive about a half mile down the road to get turned around. By the time I got back, someone had moved it to the sidewalk, and(surprisingly enough) it was actually none the worse for wear other than the cover being off.

Last week's weather has made me wish that I had that 300lbs of servers in the trunk of my(rear wheel drive) car...I actually have 10,000 158gr lead round nose component bullets plus another 5,000 148gr lead hollow base wadcutters(all in boxes) back there now(right around 325lbs total) for traction since apparently they blew the university snow removal budget on a raise for the basketball coach this year :rolleyes: and the parking lots are still pretty treacherous.
 
bunnspecial said:
Heck, it's the first copy of 10.4 server I've personally seen for sale, and from what I understand that's not too far off from the price they usually bring.
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Way, way off the realistic going rate. BIN listings are mostly outrageous and sit around until they get relisted or removed. The most I paid was £18 for a boxed 10.4.7 UB set. Even Leopard Server averages about £25-£30 in auctions. The real spendy set is the much rarer four CD Tiger set, whether client or server. I managed to grab the client boxed for under £30 but it was a stroke of luck that the seller picked a quiet time of day for closing on the auction.



On another note, how nice of the seller to display the full serial code. Some even do that with Windows offerings, which will likely lead to that serial being blocked in due course as pirates start sharing it.
 
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weckart said:
Way, way off the realistic going rate. BIN listings are mostly outrageous and sit around until they get relisted or removed. The most I paid was £18 for a boxed 10.4.7 UB set. Even Leopard Server averages about £25-£30 in auctions. The real spendy set is the much rarer four CD Tiger set, whether client or server. I managed to grab the client boxed for under £30 but it was a stroke of luck that the seller picked a quiet time of day for closing on the auction.



On another note, how nice of the seller to display the full serial code. Some even do that with Windows offerings, which will likely lead to that serial being blocked in due course as pirates start sharing it.
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I guess I've just seen the BINs that never sell...even so they don't come up for sale too often.

Now that I have this, I'll need to track down a copy of Leopard Server. Maybe I'll luck into one like you did(a copy of Tiger on CD would be nice also).

On an unrelated note-I know that these don't officially support SAS, but does anyone know if there's a PCI-X SAS card that will work in these? There are plenty of cheap SAS cards on Ebay, but I don't want to throw money at something that has no chance of working(and I wouldn't care if I didn't have about 50 SAS drives lying around collecting dust).
 
I doubt showing the serial key matters, does apple even track those old versions anymore? But yeah, I noticed that right away, seller wasnt too bright to show that.
 
It doesn't matter too much for Apple or pre-XP Windows but sellers even display whole codes for activation based software. That is pretty stupid as they will get blacklisted as the keberos servers detect multiple IPs for the same key and the honest buyer will be SOL.
 
Speaking of keys, I have a genuine 10.4.8 tiger server disk set that came with a 2006 xserve. It has its original key paper also with sticker, will I be able to use that same key on a ppc version of tiger server? If not, anybody have a legit tiger server ppc key they want to trade for an intel version?

I tested the 10.4.8 install dvd in a powermac, and it kernel panicked during boot, saying unrecognized machine, so its intel only.

How did apple ship the CD version of tiger server? I think it was for the xserve g4? since they didnt come with dvd drives.
 
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Retail 10.4 Server is universal. The Intell key should work on a PowerPC Server installation.
 
Intell said:
Retail 10.4 Server is universal. The Intell key should work on a PowerPC Server installation.
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Did a test install of my other tiger server thats on 4x cd's. It accepted the intel key from the 2006 xserve disk set. So thanks for the advice intell. Now I can finally use my tiger server disks, going to set it up to try out on my xserve g4 when it arrives. It seems delayed by bad weather, hope it arrives ok.
 
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Surrat said:
How did apple ship the CD version of tiger server? I think it was for the xserve g4? since they didnt come with dvd drives.
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I think G4s shipped with Panther. If it was like the client edition then Apple never shipped Tiger CDs as such. You had to buy the retail DVD, send that back to Apple and request the CDs in return. The CDs were never available for purchase by the public, which is why they command a premium.
 
I arrived home to day to find this waiting for me.

I haven't opened it up yet, but will report back when I do so
 

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poiihy said:
Yay :D

So what are you going to do with it? Host servers? Maybe you can host a minecraft server better than keaton's that is actually hosted on a PowerPC! :D Or you could host a Bitfighter server.
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That is a rather obnoxious comment to make considering that you contribute just about nothing to this community and bash Keaton for putting up a server for you to play on. He has donated bandwidth, time, money, and hardware to host it and you slander it with comments like that.
 
Altemose said:
That is a rather obnoxious comment to make considering that you contribute just about nothing to this community and bash Keaton for putting up a server for you to play on. He has donated bandwidth, time, money, and hardware to host it and you slander it with comments like that.
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i didn't mean it to be obnoxious but apparently it came out to be :confused:
i removed it
I don't hate keaton's server; I think it is amazing, but I was just commenting about maybe bunnspecial could compete and make a better one. you know, like a competition. that would be fun, no? bunnspecial probably isnt into MC anyway.. but it would be fun to try to make a server better than someone else's... though not as fun to keep it going... it would probably be difficult (for the players) to spread between two players; keaton's server doesn't have enough players at it is... so whatever
 
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I know nothing about Minecraft, so there's zero chance of anything like that happening. I have to really admire 128Keaton to take the time to it up for those of you who do enjoy playing it, and have no desire to compete with him.

My immediate plans are to set it up in the closet at home, and offload tasks to it that stress my Quicksilver or take a long time. Even though I know absolutely zero about video editing, apparently I know more than anyone else in my Church and have been getting requests to put together DVDs for various occasions. Encoding often takes a long time on the G4, so being able to offload it to the G5 will be a big timesaver. I have some other ideas, but I need to play around with the hardware some to see how feasible or difficult they're going to be.

In any case, I couldn't resist and went ahead and unboxed it. Here are the unboxing photos. By the way, I'm loving the camera in the iPhone 6. My 4s had a good camera-the 6 is even better. I wrote off the 6+ as being too big, but the built-in optical image stabilization almost pushed me toward it.
 

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Looks like quite the beast! I've always wanted to try out one of these. You can practice your video skills maybe by showing up an unboxing or setup video perhaps :)
 
Here's the rest of the unboxing, as well as some comparison to some old IBM servers I have lying around. I mentioned this earlier, but Apple knows how to make a server look good both inside and out.

I've played around with the IBMs quite a bit, though, and I have to admit that the insides are a LOT easier to access than the Xserve.

One photo shows the Xserve next to a pile of IBMs(both 1U and 3U), and the other shows it open next to the IBMs. The Apple is-relatively speaking-a pain to open. The IBMs have top panels that lift right off, while on the Xserve the top cover has to be slid all the way back to come off. With as long as these things are, that's not an insignificant amount of space to get it open. IMO, the IBM design really is better thought out.

I'll also point out the lack of redundant power supplies on the Xserve, something that the IBMs have. It doesn't really matter to me, but in an enterprise environment this could potentially be a big deal.
 

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Finally, the moment of truth came to fire up the beast.

I stuck my flashed FX5200 in it, hooked up a monitor, and held my breath while I hit the power button. It booted to the Apple logo, and then I got a kernel panic during boot.

I tried the usual suite of troubleshooting-reset the PRAM and PMU, and even installed a new PRAM battery. I booted into single user mode and ran FSCK-it reported no error.

Finally, I pulled the FX5200 and dropped in a Rage 128. It booted right up. I guess that-for whatever reason-it just doesn't like the FX5200. I've used it in a couple of G4s, and it's worked fine, so I'm not sure what's going on. In any case, since my ultimate plan is to run it headless, this really isn't an issue-the Rage 128 is enough for me to get it set up. If I were going to do any serious work on it, I'd pull the 9200 out of my B&W G3, but don't see any immediate need to do that.

By the way, it currently has two 80gb HDDs. I need to pull one of the sleds and look at it-I'm assuming I can put larger/faster drives in the sleds I have, but would appreciate confirmation on this.

I'm running software update now.

I'm going to watch Ebay like a hawk, and hopefully I'll be able to pick up Leopard Server for a reasonable price.

One other thing-someone earlier mentioned these being loud. Having used the IBM servers a fair bit, I have to say that I think computer volume is fairly subjective. Under decent load now, the Xserve is quieter than any of my IBMs at idle. The IBMs run all 10 fans at full blast for a few second on booting, and could easily be mistaken for a helicopter taking off. The Xserve is probably no louder than my souped-up Quicksilver(and quieter than that same G4 with the leaf blower on the front running).

But, in any case, Kentucky is playing Georgia so any further experiments are going to have to wait. We're supposed to get snowmageddon round two tomorrow afternoon into Thursday, so I hopefully will have some more time then to play around with it.
 

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Intell said:
My statements stand alone, rather than need to follow someone else's quote.
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Your statement about redundant power supplies definitely looks out of place without a quote, especially to someone who hasn't read every word of every post in this thread before coming to your post. They wouldn't know the reasoning behind it. Furthermore, the quoted poster often gets a notification when one of their posts is quoted and that helps get the point across to them.
 
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