Ilias
Jeff GeerlingDid you know Apple used to sell rackmount servers?
In today's #MARCHintosh video, I restore an Xserve G5, and explore what made these machines tick—and some reasons why Apple stopped selling them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFnvZ4NWr00
Xavier «X» Santolaria 
@geerlingguy Yes! Good memories admin'ing then, circa 2003-2004 - That was fun! 😅
Anton@geerlingguy ha! Don't forget the storage RAIDs! Fiber channel. Impressive system.
@anton Those are in shorter supply—and I worry if I wanted to pick one up that needs shipping, if it would get damaged in transit. It'd be cool to have a setup though... especially if I could redesign the guts for SATA drives and use it as a modern backplane!
Bitslingers-R-Us@anton @geerlingguy …that never transitioned to SATA…
I remember sourcing 750 gig IDE drives for an Xserve RAID. I also remember setting an old one up with seven 2TB 2.5” laptop SATA drives on SATA-IDE adapters… Fibre channel and XSAN did make it easy to share with lots of machines.
Stephen@geerlingguy I was wondering with their push to build more AI servers for themselves if the mac pro would simply turn into more of a rack mount solution. They could use it internally but also sell it at an extreme markup to those interested. But with them likely just going to google probably not.
Blake Garner@stephen @geerlingguy There is a rack mount mac pro option. Who knows when they will update it tho.
@trode @geerlingguy I know the Intel one had a rackmount option but I didnt know if the Apple Silicon model did. Either way was it 2u or 3u?
@trode @geerlingguy Ooof. Im curious what case they went with when they were building their own Apple SIlicon servers. I would think a 1u or 2u supermicro or something...
@stephen @geerlingguy the Rac Pro is for media production houses and places like that. Bigger cases are quieter and allow the same hardware as the tower. The custom servers Apple has for themselvs I'm sure are drastically different designs. Datacenters are about density.
@geerlingguy @trode neat! I guess I should watch that 😂
chris overcash
José Albornoz
Monte Freeman@eljojo @geerlingguy That’s awesome!🤩
Bongmaster@geerlingguy yuss, I used to have an old Xserv. it was heavy and noisy XD I got something much quieter now
Mac Cellar@geerlingguy I had two of these at one time, a dual G4 and a later Intel model. The G4 was noisy, but the Intel was ridiculously loud - like having a jet engine running in a rack.
erin sparling@geerlingguy ugh I should’ve gotten you a fun pic of my old xserve table! It still exists, but is no longer serving websites. There was a time when I ran it as a real web host though, hooked up to a WiMAX T1 that was point-to-point broadcast from a dish on the Chrysler Building, straight to my favorite apartment I ever had in Brooklyn.
We let the Flickr account lapse but the direct links still work from 2011:
- https://flic.kr/p/962ABp
- https://flic.kr/p/962BcM
- https://flic.kr/p/965Cfq
20091213-IMG_9487.jpg
@everyplace Nice! I've considered this, with G5 towers at the sides for legs.
@geerlingguy definitely easier than this solution. My friend who designed the table for me knew someone who fabbed the (iirc) steel legs for us.
Best thing about this:
1) the glass acted as a heat sink, but ther was still a toasty spot for feet during the winter.
2) we only used three drive bays (single volume boot, raid 1 across two), so the 4th drawer was good for tv remotes! This was the G4 version though, not G5, which lost one of the bays.
flywheel@geerlingguy I do and I always thought they where extremely cool. But always out of my financial reach.
ResunaWe bought a handful of Xserve G4s to use in a colo and discovered they were too deep to physically fit in the racks, they ended up acting as the "desktops" of any developers who were willing to ignore the sound.
The colo ended up with a mix of HP DL360s running Linux and 1u or 2u Alphaservers running Tru64.
@resuna Haha, they are pretty deep servers. I was surprised as I have a 6-node Arm server under the Xserve, with 24 CPU cores, probably 5x faster than it... and it's shallower by a lot, with space for more hard drives inside!
Aaron Sawdey, Ph.D.@geerlingguy @resuna osX running on a rack mount IBM POWER5 server was what would have been cool and while perhaps technically feasible, nobody would have agreed to do it.
Drikanis@geerlingguy yep. nowadays i guess they expect people to kludge desktop macs into racks with kvms everywhere, which really shouldn't be needed except apple believes you should only be able to use native apple hardware to produce software in their walled garden. :/
Kevin Hayes@geerlingguy I used to really want one of these but today I think Sonnet makes pretty cool solutions: https://www.sonnettech.com/product/rackmac-mini-2024/overview.html
@geerlingguy cool!
The 500 Hats of LambdaCalculus@geerlingguy I had an Xserve G5 that I was planning to turn into a build server for OpenBSD or NetBSD long ago. If I ever come across another one, I'll be revisiting that plan.
Aho@geerlingguy at one workplace we had one in the office storage, quite noisy every time someone went and fetch something from the storage...
Falk Stern@geerlingguy You could install them off iPods and could configure everything from the server manager app from your PowerBook 😊
@falk_ Ha, good excuse for all sysadmins to get a couple iPods on the house!
Geekman@geerlingguy Man, I used to love these, until the support thinned out and I was basically administrating a very obstinate and obscure Linux/UNIX distro.
@geerlingguy In fact, back in 2010 and 2011, I collaborated with a fellow I met online to start a grassroots campaign to, as the site said, "Save the Xserve". Obviously it wasn't very successful, but it certainly gave something for people to rally around.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110101053630/http://www.savethexserve.com/
@geerlingguy I still have an Xserve G4 that caught on fire while it was colocated. It has a Sonnet dual processor 7447a accelerator, and the power circuitry for the second processor went up in spectacular fashion. The burn left marks on the upper case.
Interestingly, the system still works, but I have to boot and run a uniprocessor NetBSD kernel. Trying to bring up the second processor causes the system to crash, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
I wish I had a place to run it…
@geerlingguy Is yours the newer motherboard that supports 2 gig DIMMs and can take up to 16 gigs?
BTW - Macs have had serial ports all the way up to the beige G3 - they were just mini-DIN-8 / mini-DIN-9. They could be used as console ports, too, accessed from Open Firmware and Mac OS X.
@AnachronistJohn I think this one only 1 GB DIMMS, but not sure
Tobias@geerlingguy I really liked the air intakes
Myk@geerlingguy Imagine if they threw some support to the linux kernel and made linux a first class OS on m4/m5 minis.
erstwhile@geerlingguy . . . Did you know that Mastadon has #AltText for images so the blind can read your image contents too ??
@erstwhile I added alt text to both images.
@geerlingguy my appologies, found that again, elsewhere, think it's my client that's not doing alt txt correctly..
@erstwhile no problem, one quirk of mastodon is I also use two clients and web, and sometimes I forget the alt text in the client that doesn't prompt for it
Georg TuparevWe still have 2 or 3 of them acting as FTP and mail servers. Rock solid hardware!
heyda!@geerlingguy at my first software job we had a rack with a bunch of these in it. Ran hudson and ichat and email for our office. Honestly a great platform from what I remember.
Arnan@geerlingguy They’re noisy as hell, but xserve was pretty cool.