[C.J. Moof]

I need to arrange a light duty file server for just 2 users. Right now the files they need to share are hosted by one user machine who turns filesharing on and off as needed, since on has been giving stability problems (it's OS9). This puts a burden on her workstation, leads to crashes, ect, ect.

OS X Server is just plain overkill- so much more there than they need. ASIP is EOL, so I can't steer them into that. A Snap Server is interesting and simple to use, but not a great value.

They have a beige G3 tower that right now does very little. It's qualified to run Jag, and could easily get a big fat HD crammed in it for $100. They don't need to worry about who can see what, it's just 2 of them- they could use the same admin account to log in.

All I can see missing is easy administration tools, but there's just 2 of them, sitting shoulder to shoulder... they're not going to manage a bunch of accounts and permissions, just store stuff in a central place. Nothing more.

What do you think? Is there any reason a standard install of Jag wouldn't fit their needs? It seems too easy, but yet, seems like the right tool for the job.

[msuper69]

It will work just fine for what you're proposing.

[bluedog]

The beige G3's cannot boot OSX from more than the first 8GB of a hard drive.

I suggest you have the system on one drive and put all the fireshares on your next large hard drive.

The machine will mount and use the larger drives, but the firmware has a limitation for booting and recognizing a valid system.

Also, this generation of machine may or may not have an internal SCSI card. You need to update the firmware if your particular one has it BEFORE installing OSX. If it has internal IDE then you should be fine (keeping your system in a partition that's in the first 8GB).

Technically you can boot and install with that machine. You may have better luck with the XPOSTFACTO software that you can find at: www.versiontracker.com that adds drivers for older machines. If I remember correctly there wasn't floppy drive support with the older hardware unless you added a USB one.

There was a driver someone hacked out that was working, and I don't recall if it was rolled into the XPostFacto.

Make sure you have a minimum of 128MB RAM and I suggest 256MB.

[C.J. Moof]

Good caveat there, thanks for reminding me of that one.

It's got a 4 gig internal, but I'm not sure if it's scsi or ATA. My thought was to put the Jag install on the existing drive, then get a PCI IDE card (Sonnet Tempo RAID) and 2 80 gig drives. Mirror them for redundancy, and you're looking at a pretty solid server.