Why hack a G4 into a NAS drive. First off, NAS means Network Attached Storage. It’s basically a big hard drive you can use from any of the computers on your network. After years of service the G4 is nearing the end of it’s life. Apple raised the bar with Leopard dead-ending the earliest machines requiring 768Mhz and a modern GPU. With two exceptions (yikes and sawtooth) the G4 line has gigabit ethernet which gives you fast file transfers if you wired network supports this speed. Many commercial NAS products don’t have gigabit ethernet or charge a premium for the faster model.
An old G4 is essentially free. Okay, I paid full price for it in 1999. And I bought a dozen or so more of them over the years. My last G4 was a Mirror Door that got donated to a kid and we skipped the Wind Tunnel because we’d moved on to PowerBooks in my company. But that’s another story. I’ve seen used G4 machines of all sizes and various states for free on Craigslist or on various mailing lists I’m on. If you have to pay for one, don’t pay lots because they are nearly a decade old. Because of the age and the cost this Mac it’s highly hackable.
Most of this era Mac will have seen lots of use making it very dusty inside. Be careful when cleaning. Removing dust can cause static which can zap chips. When taking things apart to clean them go slowly. Make sure you remove every screw. If you have to force something to move it means you haven’t found all the screws. Clean the Mac with a household cleaning product like a blue window cleaner or 409. Don’t spray it directly on the inside of the case instead spray it on your paper towel. Be careful when using isopropyl alcohol to clean a case as diluted isopropyl alcohol can melt plastic. Use it with care.
Dust Off or compressed air can work magic. But it can also put dust every where. Don’t use it until you have clean a majority of dust out first. Static is always a concern. We’ve seen motherboards not work after being gunned with compressed air. When using Dust Off (or other source) use short bursts of air directed at concentrations of dust. Long blasts are wasteful. Use it outside or in your garage. We like to wait for the dust to settle before turing on a blasted Mac.
Choosing drives is a bit of hearsay and voodoo. Everyone has a preference which is based on the brand that has failed them the least. Personally we don’t care so much about brand but other things such as warrantee and power consumption. You might want to consider cost per gigabyte for determining which size to buy. For the G4 NAS talked about in the show 500G drives were the best buy. 6 months from now 1T drives will likely be the way to go.
Because of limitations on the PATA bus we need purchase and install a SATA card. There are a number of them that will work for this job. In Part 1 we choose a dumb as rocks PCI card that controlled two drives. More expensive cards have built-in RAID 0, 1, 5 but we don’t need that feature for this project. Plan to spend around $50.
After you’ve cleaned the case, installed drives, and controller its time to fire up the Mac. Format the drives using Disk Utility. Copy files to them, delete things giving them a good work out. Once you are certain things are working well go back to Disk Utility to format them as a RAID 1. Follow the steps here.
It has been pointed out to use that SoftRAID may be a better product then the RAID built-in OS X.
The Apple RAID software does zero monitoring. It’s a good idea to use a product to tell you the state of your disks like working, failed, about to fail, etc.. Two programs RAID Monitor and RAID Alart will monitor and report the status of your disks.
As my G4 NAS is sitting in the corner next to the phone system I use Chicken of the VNC to control it. You can use built-in Mac remote desktop screen sharing or a VNC Server to accomplish this. I use a VNC server because I wanted to change the default port for sharing. It makes my server just a little more secure.
If you aren’t using OS X Server there isn’t much control over what is shared and to whom. Normal user permissions, frankly, allow too much access. Use Share Points or Shift Share to give you absolute control over who gets access to what.
April 1st, 2008 at 5:13 am
Yay! Been waiting for this one, it seems like this one has been in the works as a project for months….
April 1st, 2008 at 7:16 am
cool, i’v seen these what i think are g4’s in an office where i work, now i’v listened to this i’m going to find out if they are for sale
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:14 am
Several Powermac G5 Cases are for sale on Ebay, so, if i take the inner core of an apple g4 cube, stuff the rest of the thing with drives, and give it some good PCI drive controllers and NICS, i have one sweet NAS system, this episode really struck a chord. However, you really should do an episode on mac case mods….
April 2nd, 2008 at 8:52 am
LOVED this episode… great work.
Talking about the evils of dust, another place to look is the area between the frame and plastic case on the outside. My DA 533 (now dual 1.73) had a metric ton of cat bunnies sandwiched in there… just another place to look for’em!
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:18 am
Hey:
I just did this with my old Digital Audio a couple months ago.
I put the drives in, got everything copied over, and it ran beautifully for a couple days then boom. The drives disappeared. \
After about five trips into the case to plug and replug and reboot the firmware and check connections and…I discovered that the trouble was I was running 10.4 on my old G4, and the controller for the Sonnett PCI card needed to be running 10.4 minimum.
Which was an adventure in itself, because the version of 10.4 I had to install was on DVD (no DVD drive in G4) and didn’t recognize an Intel Machine (meaning I couldn’t install it from my laptop).
But once I got 10.4 installed, it worked fine, and has given me no troubles since.
So, that’s my one note to add to the discussion: make sure you have the appropriate OS for the firmware of the PCI controller.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:20 am
Edit: I said that I was running 10.4. I was running 10.2 on the old G4….
April 2nd, 2008 at 11:19 am
It’s a “Time Capsule”, not a “Time Machine”, you were speaking about.
April 3rd, 2008 at 1:50 am
Great episode, thanks.
I realize this might not be a goal for your project, but a thing to consider about running 10.5 instead of 10.4 on your server is that 10.5 shares can become Time Machine target drives for 10.5 client machines.
Not sure about what power costs in the US, but this thing is always on. A Time Capsule would use a lot less power (30W vs 200-300W depending on the model), and over here in my home in Italy it’s something I’d consider.
Finally, the cool thing of having a real general purpose server running your NAS is that you can run all sorts of cool backend apps on the server, you did mention it in passing but it might be interesting to expand on this.
April 3rd, 2008 at 4:26 am
Was a great podcast. Thanks. I don’t have a need to do this specific project - but by talking us through it you ended up talking about lots of useful stuff.
April 3rd, 2008 at 6:27 pm
Great show. I can definitely recommend keeping backups and live backups of everything (including the OS.)
I have TimeMachine turned on (and off) to backup my MacBookPro onto my terabyte drive.
I also keep a 160gigger as a carbon copy backup of my hard drive. And these I’m real glad I did that.
OS X 10.5.1 works great (I record podcasts with it,) but 10.5.2 sucks lemons as there is some form of distortion and echo monster that makes all of my recording from my Samson C01U USB mike turn to crap.
It doesn’t help that 10.5.2.is crippled with debugging turned on.
I boot in verbose mode so I get to see what is turned ON of boot time and what errors are reported at shutdown time,) and its much slower boot time, window opening time and that previously mentioned distortion monster. (Maybe its a CoreAudio flaw?)
Great show and right on time too.
I’m going to use my old PowerBook G4 and hook it up to my network with a bunch of 250GB FireWire drives acting as a true RAID. (I have leaned all about the importance of maintaining “sufficient free air delivery” the hard way. I’ll keep several inches of space of air flowing between the drives.)
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Can you tell me where you can but Mac OS X.4 server for $100 pretty please?
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:54 pm
while researching the show I searched under froogle.google.com for os x server tiger. there were several listings for $200 and one for $100. I just did a similar search but none of those listing came up. I’m guessing that this will be a YMMV prospect. however a look on ebay revealed lots of options. everything from obviously stolen to the real deal is there. what was possibly more exciting was a 10 user 10.5 for with a by-it-now of $300.
April 4th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
I happen to have a G3 Beige minitower sitting in the basement with 10.2 installed doing nothing, and I would like to put together a RAID 1 NAS system for my home network.
I’ve been looking for such a NAS system for a while now and you’re right, the commercial raid solutions available are expensive, and the non-raid solutions are, well, non-raid. So…
Is there any reason why what you did to your G4 would not work well on my G3?
Does it have to use OS X server?
Are there gigabit ethernet cards that will work with that machine as well as sata cards?
And will my existing OS X 10.2 be okay?
Thanks for a fascinating podcast.
Dan
April 4th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Is there any reason why what you did to your G4 would not work well on my G3?
Blue and White G3 would be as far back as I would go. The Beige models stopped being officially supported at OS X 10.2. Although you can get newer OS X to run by using the tool XPostFacto. There are other issues with the older Mac like the maximum memory it can have, the age of the boot drive, it’s lack of USB (although a $10 PCI card will fix that).
Using your old Mac goes with the theme of “use what you already have.” As all the parts can get moved forward you aren’t throwing money at a 10 year old black hole.
Does it have to use OS X server?
No. It can use plain old OS X. Make sure to use users and groups extensions listed above. I used OS X Server because I already had it running in the Mac that got RAID’d.
Are there gigabit ethernet cards that will work with that machine as well as sata cards?
Maybe. Here’s an article that offers some insight to that problem. Gigabit ethernet isn’t really needed for your file server unless you are storing really large files on it. It’s nice to have if you have it though. Which was why the G4 is really the perfect platform for this project. You don’t have to pay to get it (or you’ve already paid and have it).
And will my existing OS X 10.2 be okay?
Sure. There’s nothing wrong with 10.2. It’s old. But that’s it’s only problem. The VNC server will run on it. But some of the old Mac’s won’t work headless unless you have a video adapter to fool it to working. Here’s a link for the adapter. You might already have one if you are running a non-Apple display.
April 5th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
Is there any reason this wouldn’t work with OS 9? I’ve got a first-run G4 400 lying around at the moment (I guess that would make it Yikes as there’s no gigabit) and it’s never had OS X on it. I know that OS 9 plays quite nicely with Windows in network shares but I was wondering how well it will play with a SATA card (or software RAID for that matter).
Loved the sirens by the way. I haven’t heard sirens like that in years
April 5th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
OS 9 you say….
You’re kidding right? Okay, maybe you aren’t kidding. There are several SATA cards listed as working with OS 9. Sonnet and FirmTek both do. Your next battle is finding a copy of RAID Tool Kit from FWB as OS 9 has no built-in tools to make a RAID drive. I don’t remember other software from that era.
Of course you can just use built-in File Sharing, Users and Groups, Web Sharing to control access. But I would seek out AppleShare IP. Which has way betterfile sharing extensions for managing users, groups, share points and has better Windows support.
April 6th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Can we have a link to an ebay page or a site where we can purchase the old OS X 10.4 server that you mention is so inexpensive.
April 7th, 2008 at 7:23 am
as eBay is a random event any link that we put here would rot. also retailers are going to have a limited supply of OSXS and it’s to them to sell their inventory at “everything must go” prices. we suspect that there will be cheap OS X Server for a long time in all versions.
search and ye’ shall find.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:29 am
I have a blue and white g3 running tiger 10.4 with a 6 GB drive in it,
I want to put two 200 GB drives with redundant raid. Is this possible?
If so what will I need?
Matt
April 7th, 2008 at 11:43 am
Hi. This episode [apparently] messed up syncing between my iPhone and iTunes, believe it or not. My best guess is that there was some sort of file corruption that happened when I downloaded the episode? Not the STRANGEST thing that has happened between my iPhone and Mac, but certainly in the top 5. At the end of a sync over the past several days I get this “The disk [name of iPhone] could not be read from or written to” error. But it DID seem to sync everything just fine. Then this morning it would not sync certain movies and podcasts. So I did a restore on iPhone, after which it would sync very little and quit. Tried a few more times and I noticed it seemed to encounter the error while syncing this particular episode. (G4 NAS Drive part 1). So I trashed the episode and now everything seems to go as it should. Crazy.
April 8th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
a G3 running Tiger will do this job. it will work using the steps outlined during out talk. the difference will be that the space for drives is slightly different. also, you may want to consider larger drives. 200GB isn’t that big a drive when it’s filled with media. remember that I picked a G4 because I had one that was retired and that it had Gigabit Ethernet in it. You can always add a GigE card for cheap.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:43 am
I have an old G4 that I am pondering this idea.
What benefits are there to setting this up as a file server other than just buying another external hard drive. Would there be other things I could use it for if I just use OSX Tiger?
Thanks, great episode.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:45 am
going to connect the G4 via the VGA on my current monitor. Then I just have to switch the source on the monitor. Also have my Xbox 360 Elite connected to it.
April 10th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
BTW: Software RAID also works under Mac OS X 10.3. I have a Quicksilver that has had a pair of 120GB PATA drives on a PCI ATA 133 card configured as RAID 1 since day one. The machine is no longer providing my backup service, since the drives are nearly stuffed (I now use a 750GB RAID 1 setup in my Mac Pro…), but the machine still runs as my 10.3 compile box. The interesting thing is that the RAID drives spin up too slowly for the OS, which gives me an alert asking me to either eject, format or ignore the logical drive. If I choose ignore everything mounts and works correctly…
One tech note: Be careful to update your computer to the highest version of Mac OS X possible before setting up the Software RAID. A RAID formated under 10.3 will not mount under 10.4. Likewise a RAID formated under 10.4 will not mount under 10.5. My Quicksilver is frozen into 10.3, as my Mac Pro is on 10.4. Obviously, you can back up the contents of the RAID, upgrade the OS, reformat the RAID, and then restore the data from the external back-up.
April 11th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
I have a comment and a question:
Comment: I’ve been using SoftRAID (softraid.com) for a few years now, and it’s really nice. It lets you create software RAIDs out of standard volumes without having to re-format (though backing up is always recommended), lets you create a RAID with different-sized drives (and use the leftover space on the larger drive for another non-RAID volume, or even a RAID volume paired with another drive), and even lets you RAID your startup volume. I was also pleased to see that the driver is built in to Leopard (though without the app, you can’t create new RAIDs). It also pops up error dialogs whenever any errors occur on any RAID volumes. Definitely something to consider.
Question: Somewhat in line with Duncan’s comment, I was wondering if you had any notion of which would consume less power: a G4 box with all internal drives (like you built), or a Mac Mini with a pair of external FireWire drives. I was thinking of retiring my old B&W G3 (upgraded long ago to a 500MHz G4) in favor of the Mini, since the G3 box undoubtedly draws more power than the Mini. But I’m wondering if the 2 power supplies for the external drives will end up drawing more power overall.
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:24 am
[...] 25 per show, and the geekier the show, the more comments! Take, for instance, the show where they turned an old G4 Power Mac into a NAS drive (a long standing request of mine). How geeky is that? It got 25 comments! You have to be a hardcore [...]
April 21st, 2008 at 1:24 am
Great show, and this is precisely what I’ve done on the Digital Audio G4 serving our small business network.
Note that one can create a $0 solution for regular monitoring of your software RAID on MacOS X 10.4 Server using ‘diskutil checkraid’ in your daily maintenance script. Provided you have configured periodic(8) to direct the output of your maintenance scripts to email you will receive a daily report on your RAID status in your inbox.
Not quite real-time monitoring but adequate for most ‘G4 NAS’ applications I would think.