Resolved Server…

[eyoungren]

Server doing it's job. Streaming music to my Quad while executing a backup to the external drive connected to the PC.

[doublepost=1553963976][/doublepost]

I may has asked this already, but how do Play Counts work on a shared iTunes library (notably on two or more computers running iTunes 4.0)? Does each computer have its own settings and play counts? Or is it saved on the server's library preferences and distributed to any connected?

I believe I can answer this now.

Play count does not show up in the column list when connected to a shared library. Any plays from a client do not show up in the count on the server.

So, play count only applies to a client with a local library.

 

[eyoungren]

Ah yes, yet another 'Doing it's job post'.

G3 taking my 17" PowerBook TM backup while streaming the iTunes 4 library to the PowerBook.

I love when old hardware is working productively as designed!

 

[1042686]

Ah yes, yet another 'Doing it's job post'.

G3 taking my 17" PowerBook TM backup while streaming the iTunes 4 library to the PowerBook.

I love when old hardware is working productively as designed!

View attachment 854531

Looking good. And to think I was feeling productive reorganizing my ppc software library & hdd images off my boxes & onto my NAS.

That B&W server is certainly the coolest bit of old tech I’ve seen in quite a while.

Always nice to see RD get a lil cameo action.

 

[eyoungren]

Looking good. And to think I was feeling productive reorganizing my ppc software library & hdd images off my boxes & onto my NAS.

That B&W server is certainly the coolest bit of old tech I’ve seen in quite a while.

Always nice to see RD get a lil cameo action.

One of these days I'm going to get all the crap sitting on my storage drive (on my Quad) burned to disc. I have enough discs, I just don't want to be spending several days at it.

I like the fact that I've done enough upgrades to make the Mac entirely viable as a server, but not so much that I've pushed it to the limit of it's capabilities.

I've still only tapped maybe 10-20 percent of what it's capable of doing with server software. If I can get over my fears of setting up a VPN that'll be next.

I just happened to be in that thread when I was capturing the screenshot so RD got free publicity.

 

[eyoungren]

Well…apparently I haven't updated this in a while. Anyway, things happened.

Not sure what and when, but today as I was swapping Cinema Displays the server decided it was time to start acting weird. Spent two hours troubleshooting with no real resolution. I had to connect a monitor to realize it was kernel panicking on boot.

After almost a week of moving stuff around (garage) and getting two Mac Minis back up (one with two HDTVs) I'm done with this. If you know me then you know that I advance my hardware about 10-15 years behind everyone else. The G3 is 23 years old and was only serving to share the 2TB RAID enclosure. I've got other stuff that's working.

No real idea what I will do with this thing, no real idea what the problem is. But right now, I don't care. 2TB RAID is connected to the MacPro now via a long FW800 cable and the G3 is in the garage with all the cards removed.

There comes a point where the far end of my slow tech advance moves past PowerPC and I think it's starting to happen now. I have no plans to put this G3 back in service for what it was doing. I had diminishing returns with my old QS and I decided at some point earlier this year that when this stuff starts to fail I will be cutting my losses.

It was a good run…

 

[scarlett7447]

Not sure what and when, but today as I was swapping Cinema Displays the server decided it was time to start acting weird. Spent two hours troubleshooting with no real resolution. I had to connect a monitor to realize it was kernel panicking on boot.

Sounds like a RAM problem to me. My machine was randomly freezing and crashing and it turns out some of the RAM was dying.

 

[DearthnVader]

Well…apparently I haven't updated this in a while. Anyway, things happened.

Not sure what and when, but today as I was swapping Cinema Displays the server decided it was time to start acting weird. Spent two hours troubleshooting with no real resolution. I had to connect a monitor to realize it was kernel panicking on boot.

After almost a week of moving stuff around (garage) and getting two Mac Minis back up (one with two HDTVs) I'm done with this. If you know me then you know that I advance my hardware about 10-15 years behind everyone else. The G3 is 23 years old and was only serving to share the 2TB RAID enclosure. I've got other stuff that's working.

No real idea what I will do with this thing, no real idea what the problem is. But right now, I don't care. 2TB RAID is connected to the MacPro now via a long FW800 cable and the G3 is in the garage with all the cards removed.

There comes a point where the far end of my slow tech advance moves past PowerPC and I think it's starting to happen now. I have no plans to put this G3 back in service for what it was doing. I had diminishing returns with my old QS and I decided at some point earlier this year that when this stuff starts to fail I will be cutting my losses.

It was a good run…

Why is it always such a sad thing, these Mac's seem like our friends I suppose.

 

[eyoungren]

Why is it always such a sad thing, these Mac's seem like our friends I suppose.

Yeah, but like any friend who's been drinking your beer, eating your food, sleeping on your couch and then throws a fit when you ask it to clean up or do the dishes - there's a time.

 

[DearthnVader]

Yeah, but like any friend who's been drinking your beer, eating your food, sleeping on your couch and then throws a fit when you ask it to clean up or do the dishes - there's a time.

I suffer from crippling anxiety, the only thing that provides me any relief is fooling with these old Macs.

Even tho they cost me money most of the time, the relief it provides me is worth its' weight in gold.

I normally get them from Facebook MarketPlace for cheap and in bunches, so I can sell working parts of them and buy more stuff to go with them.

I pretty much end up breaking even and I have lots of fun PPC stuff to play with.

The bonus is we find ways to push what these old system can do.

 

[eyoungren]

I suffer from crippling anxiety, the only thing that provides me any relief is fooling with these old Macs.

Even tho they cost me money most of the time, the relief it provides me is worth its' weight in gold.

I normally get them from Facebook MarketPlace for cheap and in bunches, so I can sell working parts of them and buy more stuff to go with them.

I pretty much end up breaking even and I have lots of fun PPC stuff to play with.

The bonus is we find ways to push what these old system can do.

Anxiety is no joke. It's caused my sister a few trips to the emergency room for panic attacks. So, whatever helps is always worth the investment. I have to say that the insides of the older PowerPC Macs are a lot friendlier than the newer ones.

 

[B S Magnet]

I suffer from crippling anxiety, the only thing that provides me any relief is fooling with these old Macs.

Along with making old Macs work wonders beyond expectations, you and I also have this in common.

 

[eyoungren]

Server is back…



A couple years ago I took it down. At the suggestion of another member I had shifted PCI cards and was experiencing kernal panics when rebooting.

Today it was working fine. But the MOMENT I had a NIC reinstalled and ethernet cable plugged in I got a KP on boot. So, I shut it down and rebooted with the cable unplugged. No KP.

Hmmmmm…

So, for whatever reason this was the problem. It KPs whenever there is a boot with the network cable plugged in. After plugging the cable in AFTER it fully booted - no issue. Weird. But, well problem solved. Two years or so later.

I timed the Mac to full boot without the cable plugged in. Around 50 seconds to the desktop. If I have to reboot again, I know that I have to give the Mac at least 50 seconds minimum before plugging the cable back in.

Other issues that will be resolved on Monday: I have my Sonnet Tempo card installed, but I only had ONE SATA cable and NO Molex to SATA power cables. I have to wait for those to come. I also have a used SSD coming for my MacPro. When that arrives, I will pull the 6TB hard drive from my MacPro that this SSD will replace and that will be plugged in to the G3.

Since I'll be opening it back up, I'll drop the second NIC back in.

Once I'm all done the server will be sharing one 3TB drive and one 6TB drive.

EDIT: Oh, PS. That monitor you see is NOT connected to the G3. Behind the closed door is a Dell Windows XP computer I got from the Goodwill a while back. The monitor is connected to that. For right now anyway. The PC is there because I want to get Mechwarrior games back up and running. My son and I had fun with those, but they seem impossible to run on emulation. And this is an XP machine, so it's right in the wheelhouse for that era of games.

Going to go back to the Goodwill for another monitor that has VGA and DVI. Will hook the VGA up to the PC and the DVI to the Mac.

 

[eyoungren]

Server shares are back up. One 3TB drive and one 6TB drive.

 

[eyoungren]

And so ends that experiment…

The G3 is still unstable and an attempt to revert to Panther worked, but the drives attached to the SATA card are now in a format the Mac no longer recognizes. Originally, I had Tiger Server installed which is why I wanted to try Panther. Screen sharing is not working in Panther either.

I COULD get it to Tiger, but the effort involved is not worth the expenditure of my energy for what is ultimately a NAS. Same with the G4 I was also using as a glorified NAS. So, I simply bought another NAS.

I've marked resolved on this thread (even though there was never an initial problem) so as to close it out.

We're done with 'servers'. It is now evident to me that when I do move on, I DO move on. The farthest back I can really reach now for making things integrated with everything else on my network is Leopard and my 17" PowerBook.

Will have to find another use for the G3.

 

[ervus]

I'm curious if changing your G3 CPU to a G4 would change anything. I seem to remember having some weird driver problems on a G3 iBook that never cropped up with the drive transplanted into a G4 iBook. Maybe OS X 10.4 was not fully built or tested on the G3?

 

[eyoungren]

I'm curious if changing your G3 CPU to a G4 would change anything. I seem to remember having some weird driver problems on a G3 iBook that never cropped up with the drive transplanted into a G4 iBook. Maybe OS X 10.4 was not fully built or tested on the G3?

Well, it was stable for years. Then I got the bright idea to move one of the network cards into the slot reserved for the video card because the server ran headless. That's when the inability to boot without a kernel panic when I had network cables plugged in started occurring.

By that point, I already had a G4/500 on the network that was doing the same thing as the G3, only using the client version of Leopard. So, I retired the G3 at that time.

Between then and now, the G4 got retired because I dropped in a Synology NAS. But I brought the G3 back because I was doing some other stuff and had a place for it. That's when I discovered that large file transfers, for which the G3 previously didn't have any issues, were causing the Mac to freeze.

I have four viable Gig-E NICs and it's not working with any of them. I could have tried the onboard ethernet port, but there's really no point in having the server up for Fast Ethernet when I have a Gig-E network.

So, I don't know what the issue is, but as it's no longer really part of my networking, I just don't care to spend the energy figuring it out. The new NAS is going to handle the disks I had in the G3. That will make for three NAS boxes on my home network.

As to putting a G4 in it…here is my thought process on that. When I originally got it, it was specifically for it to be a G3 server. I considered dropping in a G4 processor, but then this would have been a G4 and not a G3. I eventually ended up with a G4 that someone was getting rid of and at that point it was also a matter of "Why put a G4 in the G3 if I already have a G4?".

So, it just really was never a consideration.

There was a time I'd have gone to great lengths to figure this out and solve it. But since 2020 and shifting to Intel and moving on to Mojave and above, getting newer Macs as well, my older Macs have just slipped down on the list of things I will spend time and energy on for various purposes and reasons.

 

[Project Alice]

Well, it was stable for years. Then I got the bright idea to move one of the network cards into the slot reserved for the video card because the server ran headless. That's when the inability to boot without a kernel panic when I had network cables plugged in started occurring.

By that point, I already had a G4/500 on the network that was doing the same thing as the G3, only using the client version of Leopard. So, I retired the G3 at that time.

Between then and now, the G4 got retired because I dropped in a Synology NAS. But I brought the G3 back because I was doing some other stuff and had a place for it. That's when I discovered that large file transfers, for which the G3 previously didn't have any issues, were causing the Mac to freeze.

I have four viable Gig-E NICs and it's not working with any of them. I could have tried the onboard ethernet port, but there's really no point in having the server up for Fast Ethernet when I have a Gig-E network.

It was still freezing when you didn't use the NIC in the "graphics" slot?
I'm just curious. I don't use a PowerMac as my server, but I do have a Mystic G4 I have setup that it does run as a NAS if I boot it up. It was my "backup" server for stuff if my TrueNAS Mac Pro went down.

Anyway, before the Mystic, and the Mac Pro. I was using a Sawtooth G4, with the NIC out of an Xserve G4. I never had a problem with it, and obviously the card worked natively in OS X. I bought another one of those cards and stuck it in my B&W G4, and it has always worked fine. I never used it for server duties, but it has downloaded a lot of large files from my NAS.

 

[eyoungren]

It was still freezing when you didn't use the NIC in the "graphics" slot?
I'm just curious. I don't use a PowerMac as my server, but I do have a Mystic G4 I have setup that it does run as a NAS if I boot it up. It was my "backup" server for stuff if my TrueNAS Mac Pro went down.

Anyway, before the Mystic, and the Mac Pro. I was using a Sawtooth G4, with the NIC out of an Xserve G4. I never had a problem with it, and obviously the card worked natively in OS X. I bought another one of those cards and stuck it in my B&W G4, and it has always worked fine. I never used it for server duties, but it has downloaded a lot of large files from my NAS.

Everything was fine. Two Gig-E NICs working as expected, no issues with booting headless. For a period of time I was remarking on the uptime of the Mac.

Then, it was suggested to me that I might get a bit more transfer speed if I put one of the NICs in the graphic card slot. So, I did. And that is when the Mac started to freeze on boot whenever an ethernet cable was plugged in to the NIC. And it doesn't matter which slot the NICs are in now.

By the time I started having this issue, I had the G4 and my first NAS. So, I retired the G3 until a couple weeks ago when I tried to put it back in service. It turns out that the machine WILL boot without a KP if there is no ethernet cables plugged in to the NICs. I did not test the onboard ethernet port itself. Just the NICs.

Once it was booted, I could plug cables in, connect, move files around, copy, etc. But once file copies started to get above 1TB of data, the Mac started to lock up. And it locked up consistently.

So, now it's retired for that purpose and I am not bringing it back for that purpose again. Sure, I could probably figure it out, but I don't want to spend the time and energy to do so when I can just buy another NAS. Which I don't need BTW, but the attempt at bringing the G3 back was to put two drives to use that were just sitting around.

Today, they went into the new NAS. I'm formatting drives as I type this.

 

[Project Alice]

Everything was fine. Two Gig-E NICs working as expected, no issues with booting headless. For a period of time I was remarking on the uptime of the Mac.

Then, it was suggested to me that I might get a bit more transfer speed if I put one of the NICs in the graphic card slot. So, I did. And that is when the Mac started to freeze on boot whenever an ethernet cable was plugged in to the NIC. And it doesn't matter which slot the NICs are in now.

By the time I started having this issue, I had the G4 and my first NAS. So, I retired the G3 until a couple weeks ago when I tried to put it back in service. It turns out that the machine WILL boot without a KP if there is no ethernet cables plugged in to the NICs. I did not test the onboard ethernet port itself. Just the NICs.

Once it was booted, I could plug cables in, connect, move files around, copy, etc. But once file copies started to get above 1TB of data, the Mac started to lock up. And it locked up consistently.

So, now it's retired for that purpose and I am not bringing it back for that purpose again. Sure, I could probably figure it out, but I don't want to spend the time and energy to do so when I can just buy another NAS. Which I don't need BTW, but the attempt at bringing the G3 back was to put two drives to use that were just sitting around.

Today, they went into the new NAS. I'm formatting drives as I type this.

That's odd. B&W G3s are weird though. I haven't moved a TB+ to\from any PPC Mac before. I wonder if it was a RAM issue or something. I think the most I've transferred at one time was probably like 130GB or so, and that was either a G4 or an iMac G5.

I was just curious. Thanks for indulging me lol