Hello!
Recently I picked up a Power Mac G3 B&W Rev. 1. It was surprisingly not very temperamental and hosted my Korg OASYS and dual booted Tiger just fine for all of a month before I found a nice deal on a Dual 1GHz G4 card for my Quicksilver. Now my Quicksilver is pulling wacky PCI card duty on OS 9 and OS X, leaving the G3 without a purpose. Initially I thought about selling it but I had a better idea: why not turn it into a file server to host all the various install media that I or my friends (mostly just me) might need for all the old equipment we own!
Right now I have two ATTO UL3D SCSI cards that I got for free with the Quicksilver and then a RAID ATA/66 controller for my boot drive. I want to run two drives on each card, then put them all in a RAID configuration or one RAID config each if I can't. I also thought about getting a Gigabit Ethernet card for faster data transfers across the network. Upgrading to 1GB of RAM total is also likely on the to-do list I just need to find sticks that the machine will agree with. I also do have the original Adaptec SCSI card but I really doubt it will get much use aside from maybe becoming the boot drive controller as it's faster than my ATA/66 card.
I don't know if I want to run Linux or if I want to run Mac OS X Server. I'd essentially be stuck on 10.4 Server because of the G3 Processor (maybe with a G4 upgrade I can think about running 10.5 Server). Meanwhile Adelie Linux seems to be more modern and more secure, but I lose some of the neat netboot support I'd imagine I'd get with Mac OS X Server. I also am considering OS X Server 1.2 but that just seems too old to be genuinely useful. More of a curiosity than anything else.
In short the goal is to just have a host for installers and netboot support for all of my various machines and anyone else's that I let onto the network (it'll be through Tailscale on my router, so I can set up a subnet and reach the server that way). Looking for advice on the operating system and software really is all, or if there's some hardware I should look out for for this purpose.
Recently I picked up a Power Mac G3 B&W Rev. 1. It was surprisingly not very temperamental and hosted my Korg OASYS and dual booted Tiger just fine for all of a month before I found a nice deal on a Dual 1GHz G4 card for my Quicksilver. Now my Quicksilver is pulling wacky PCI card duty on OS 9 and OS X, leaving the G3 without a purpose. Initially I thought about selling it but I had a better idea: why not turn it into a file server to host all the various install media that I or my friends (mostly just me) might need for all the old equipment we own!
Right now I have two ATTO UL3D SCSI cards that I got for free with the Quicksilver and then a RAID ATA/66 controller for my boot drive. I want to run two drives on each card, then put them all in a RAID configuration or one RAID config each if I can't. I also thought about getting a Gigabit Ethernet card for faster data transfers across the network. Upgrading to 1GB of RAM total is also likely on the to-do list I just need to find sticks that the machine will agree with. I also do have the original Adaptec SCSI card but I really doubt it will get much use aside from maybe becoming the boot drive controller as it's faster than my ATA/66 card.
I don't know if I want to run Linux or if I want to run Mac OS X Server. I'd essentially be stuck on 10.4 Server because of the G3 Processor (maybe with a G4 upgrade I can think about running 10.5 Server). Meanwhile Adelie Linux seems to be more modern and more secure, but I lose some of the neat netboot support I'd imagine I'd get with Mac OS X Server. I also am considering OS X Server 1.2 but that just seems too old to be genuinely useful. More of a curiosity than anything else.
In short the goal is to just have a host for installers and netboot support for all of my various machines and anyone else's that I let onto the network (it'll be through Tailscale on my router, so I can set up a subnet and reach the server that way). Looking for advice on the operating system and software really is all, or if there's some hardware I should look out for for this purpose.
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