iMac as X Server?

M

mindbend

Registered
At work my buddy set up his old PII as a Win2K server. It runs OK, but I can't get long file names and we have all sorts of date stamp issues and weird things happening.

Anyway, I've got this little iMac 400 at home. Any hope for this as a file server? There's only two of us that would be connected. Would I need the full blown Server version of X for two people or would simply turning on file sharing be fast enough? I assume all long file names would work.

I was thinking of just plopping like an 80gig drive or something.

Any thoughts of what kind of performance I could expect. Would it match or exceed the PII running Win2K Srvr? Ethernet is 10/100 only. Can I mix and match a gigabit ethernet hub with the 10/100 hub (to save money) since I've got lots of other devices on the net that don't need to access the file server? Would getting a gigabit hub show a noticeable speed increase on the PII srvr, or is the machine itself too slow? Right now we serving at about 7 megs per second give or take.

If you could build the ideal server to feed two Macs and a PC laptop, what would it be ad what would it run? I deal a lot with large Photoshop files, so I want the fastest transfer speeds. My buddy deals with lots of small files for websites and such.

Thanks for any advice.
 
I don't think you'd need the server version of X. This version is kinda expensive for what it offers compared to OS X...sure, it has GUI apps for configuring most of the server stuff, but I think in your case, standard OS X would be fine...

since the integer performance of the G3 would equal most P2, the performance should be more than fine when it comes to server operations.
But remember that you will be limited to a 100 mbit connection to the server, so dealing with those large photoshop files could be a pain...normally, you can mix gigabit and fast ethernet hubs...well, I'd say keep the photoshop files locally on your drive and use the server as a backup place where you store all your projects on the end of the day...for this task, it should be great, PLUS, you can set it up as an Apache server with CGI/PERL, PHP4, iASP, mySQL, whatever you want, and your brother can use it to test websites before putting them online....an intranet development environment is always a good thing to have
 
mindbend -

for just two users accessing the machine, an iMac400 running OS X would be probably be fine.

If OS X runs too slowly on the iMac for it to serve files effectively (which I doubt), you could try Linux. It would be harder to administer than OS X, but it's free, it's fast, and you have at least three distributions to choose from (LinuxPPC, YellowDog, and SusE)...
 
Originally posted by serpicolugnut
mindbend -

for just two users accessing the machine, an iMac400 running OS X would be probably be fine.

If OS X runs too slowly on the iMac for it to serve files effectively (which I doubt), you could try Linux. It would be harder to administer than OS X, but it's free, it's fast, and you have at least three distributions to choose from (LinuxPPC, YellowDog, and SusE)...
Click to expand...

Use RedHat Linux, it is even easier to administer than most Windows server OSes in most parts since it has excellent installing routines, configuring nearly everything for you.

I was really amazed when I was able to run Apache with MySQL, PHP4 and PDFLib OUT OF THE BOX! RedHat does a really fine job. For the rest, of course, you have to have a bit knowledge of Linux, but the basic installation already has nearly everything you need: a great webserver with PERL and PHP, an industry standard database server (MySQL), an ftp server (FTPD), an easy to configure firewall (ipchains/iptables), a very interesting window server (GNOME) and everything is preconfigured...
 
I went ahead and sacrificed my home iMac to replace our Win2K server per your comments here. I should have done this months ago. It runs a little faster then the Win2K box, maybe 10-15%. Also, long file names no longer an issue. Plus, little things like custom icons, native environment and all the rest.

I can even connect to an external firewire drive off the iMac "server" and send files over almost as fast as if it were locally connected.

I think I was afraid to try this before because I had tried a similar thing using an older Mac with Appletalk and even TCP/IP under OS 9. Either the machine or the protocal wasn't up to the task cuz the Win2K box blew it out of the water.

I'm happy to say that my trusty little 400Mhz iMac with just file sharing turned on and running over OS X is faster, more stable and easier to use than a dedicated Win2K advanced server. Wow.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top