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Did 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: youtube.com/watch?v=kFnvZ4NWr0…

in reply to Jeff Geerling

Yes! Good memories admin'ing then, circa 2003-2004 - That was fun! 😅
This entry was edited (4 days ago)
Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source
Jeff Geerling
@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!
in reply to Jeff Geerling

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.
in reply to Stephen

@stephen There is a rack mount mac pro option. Who knows when they will update it tho.
in reply to Blake Garner

@trode 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?
in reply to Blake Garner

@trode 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...
in reply to Stephen

@stephen @trode In my video I have a clip showing the build; looks like a fully custom solution that's 3U? It has a bunch of large heatsinks, so I'm guessing a bunch of M3 or M5 Ultra systems in one box.
in reply to Jeff Geerling

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.
in reply to Jeff Geerling

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:

- flic.kr/p/962ABp
- flic.kr/p/962BcM
- flic.kr/p/965Cfq

in reply to Jeff Geerling

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.

in reply to Jeff Geerling

We 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.

in reply to Resuna

@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!
in reply to Jeff Geerling

@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.
in reply to Jeff Geerling

I used to really want one of these but today I think Sonnet makes pretty cool solutions: sonnettech.com/product/rackmac…
in reply to Jeff Geerling

at one workplace we had one in the office storage, quite noisy every time someone went and fetch something from the storage...
in reply to Jeff Geerling

You could install them off iPods and could configure everything from the server manager app from your PowerBook 😊
in reply to Falk Stern

@falk_ Ha, good excuse for all sysadmins to get a couple iPods on the house!
in reply to Jeff Geerling

Man, I used to love these, until the support thinned out and I was basically administrating a very obstinate and obscure Linux/UNIX distro.
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mastodon - Link to source
Jeff Geerling
@AnachronistJohn I think this one only 1 GB DIMMS, but not sure
in reply to Jeff Geerling

Imagine if they threw some support to the linux kernel and made linux a first class OS on m4/m5 minis.
in reply to Jeff Geerling

. . . Did you know that Mastadon has #AltText for images so the blind can read your image contents too ??
This entry was edited (3 days ago)
in reply to Jeff Geerling

my appologies, found that again, elsewhere, think it's my client that's not doing alt txt correctly..
in reply to erstwhile

@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
in reply to Jeff Geerling

We still have 2 or 3 of them acting as FTP and mail servers. Rock solid hardware!