Ten years ago, I wrote about the different ways you could put your old mac to work. Well, as you can imagine a lot has changed in that decade:We've seen OS X mature from something than ran slowly on your beige Power Mac G3 in version 10.0 to something that absolutely screams on the latest quad core consumer based iMacs running version 10.6. We've seen iTunes go from being little more than Apple making the people who paid money for SoundJam MP feel like idiots to becoming a huge stream of revenue for Apple ... in a way most of us thought impossible back in 2001. We've also seen the iPod go from a Mac only firewire device grow into its own unique subplatform of OS X with the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Frankly, none of these things seemed to even be within the grasp of my imagination back in June of 2001.  So, with this in mind, I think it's time to write a follow up.  

            Another interesting change to keep in mind is this - Apple has put more UNIX based systems into the marketplace in the last ten years than any other hardware or software vendor. With that in mind, there are still tons of perfectly serviceable machines out there. If only to cover the ten years worth of hardware that has now found its way into basements, closets, attics, thrift stores, and the trash pile of some random person in a neighborhood. Yes, I actually do rescue old Macs from the trash.

            The original article covered the 68k era hardware and early PowerPC based Macs. 68k era Macs are awesome and all, but frankly there are dozens of articles and write-ups about how you can set up an SE/30 to run as a web server. While I love my amped up SE/30 with 128mb of RAM, 2gb hard drive, Ethernet, and A/UX loaded on it - it's more of a curiosity piece, a token of Apple's history - their first, albeit failed,  foray into UNIX (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX for more info). I wouldn't actually mess with it and try to make it do anything else - the machine is over 22 years old. For the intents and purposes of this article, I'm going to cover the G3 era and later Macs. I won't include the Intel based macs as those can pretty much run any current software out there. (yeah, I know 10.7 won't support the Core Duo - but even running 10.6 - these machines are still going to be primary machines for a while longer)

            I'll start by touching on the obvious thing most people think with older hardware - Can I run Linux on it? The answer is yes. There are Debian builds that will run on all of the PowerPC based Macs (yes, even the early ones). For info - go to this link http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/inst/install . Frankly, at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if there were Debian Linux ports that would run on the toaster I have in my kitchen. I'm not really going to go into more detail with Linux - as that's not really the point of this article. I just wanted to get it out of the way - as I know that it is a question I often get from people I give old Macs to. Heck, if you look hard enough, there's probably a recent build that will run on 68k hardware.

            For the purposes of this article, and the sake of brevity I will refer to machines by their era. To know which machines fit into which era, refer to the chart at the end of the second part of this article. The three eras are the PCI era, the Firewire Era, and the Aluminum era. I will include a breakdown of these at the end of the article.

            Now, let's look at the machines that can still work as perfectly serviceable machines for most end users as is - note the limitations that impact them. Everything from the Aluminum era is imminently still very very serviceable, even if the latest build of Flash cut support for PowerPC. As long as things like going on youtube and Netflix streaming aren't all that important to you then these are still incredibly useful machines. With these machines the best you are going to get browser wise is going to be Safari 4.1 on 10.4, and Safari 5 comes with 10.5. Firefox, sadly, killed PowerPC support with version 4, with 3.6 being the last version that will run. MS Office, up to 2008, will run without issue on these machines. Office 2011, however requires an Intel chip. Adobe Creative Suite, including Photoshop, up to CS3 will run on a G4 based mac,CS4 on G5's, and CS5 requires a multicore Intel chip. Odds are, however that you aren't going to be putting the latest software on an older machine as it probably already has the software that was being used still on it.  A handful of the firewire era machines can run 10.5, but across the board  I recommend 10.4 on all for the best balance of performance and backwards compatibility (Classic support was killed off in 10.5.)

            Perhaps, you've made the jump to an Intel based Mac, and with the impending demise of Rosetta in OS X 10.7 - you are going to end up losing the ability to run some PowerPC based software. Well, by digging up a PowerPC based OS X machine, hooking it up to you network, and setting up VNC - you'll be back in business. In fact the performance of Rosetta on Intel based Macs, on average,  is slower than a 1ghz iBook G4 with a 4200rpm hard drive, so this may actually prove to be an upgrade of sorts.

            ( For a good VNC application - check out Chicken of the VNC http://sourceforge.net/projects/cotvnc/ , despite the name, it works great)

Back Up Server

            Backing up data can get expensive. Not as expensive as recovering data, but perhaps you don't want to plunk down the money for Apple's time capsule.

                        The Hardware

 If you have an old Power Mac G3 or G4 laying around - you've got something handy you can use to set up a server. The G3's only have 10/100 (except for the beige), the G4's range from 10/100 to gigabit depending on model so network performance won't be so bad - depending on your network. What you need to know before starting is what series machine you're dealing with and it's limitations.

Any Power Mac introduced after June of 2002 can handle hard drives larger than 128 gb, anything older than that maxes at 128gb on the internal ATA bus. There are workarounds, but with how cheap old macs are getting - I won't go into them. For a backup server, the ideal mac to use is going to be a Power Mac G4 Mirrored Drive Door or better.  These machines have support for large ATA drives - 500gb PATA drives are relatively inexpensive - and these machines can handle 4 hard drives internally. You also have firewire 400 on all of these machines so external firewire drives have NO limits to the size you can use. Some vendors still have firewire on their external drives, though LaCie tends to have the best selection of firewire external drives.

                        The Software

            You have a few options here

-          Set up an older version of Retrospect Server (can be had online with a little hunting for not too much $$) on the "server", install the client on your client machines, and set a schedule through the console on your server.

-          Set up a share on your "server" , mount it on the client computer, and run a desktop version of retrospect (can be had cheaply online) with the backup going to the share. Or you can use LaCie's freeware SilverKeeper http://www.lacie.com/silverkeeper/?CFID=82575452&CFTOKEN=20274786

-          Using the share concept from the first bullet point, just drag stuff to said share.

Be sure to check out part two, where we will look at additional uses for that old Mac!