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ntsc · May 18, 2008, 06:10 PM

I manage a group of Macs running together in a small enterprise network. I currently have an old PowerMac G4 (800Mhz) box kicking around and we're running low on storage so I'm thinking about using it as a server to alleviate the situation. We already have two xServes running OS X 10.5 Server but we dont have the budget for an addition Server license. There is an Open Directory server for single sign on.

I'm thinking about using Debian on the PowerMac since i'd like to use a volume manager to provide some measure of redundancy. Does anyone have any experience deploying Linux or another Unix variant in a Mac-centric environment. Are there any pitfalls which you've discovered which I might be able to avoid? Would you suggest a particular OS for any particular reason?

mduell · May 18, 2008, 07:28 PM

Fedora and SUSE are other popular (enterprisey) current PPC distributions... Debian has some serious mud on their face right now over their braindead security practices. Gentoo is also an option if you're in to that.

Ubuntu used to have a PPC distro, but abandoned it officially a few revisions back. Yellowdog used to be big in the PPC Linux world but they seem to have abandoned Macs for Cell-based machines.

ghporter · May 18, 2008, 10:43 PM

SUSE is very well reputed as a server OS-as long as you use the full-featured server distro you'll have all the tools and capabilities you need and then some. I can't speak to Fedora because I stopped looking at Red Hat a long time ago.

seanc · May 19, 2008, 02:44 AM

So do you just want something to be able to use to create a storage box out of the G4?
With a PC, yes, I know, I'm sorry, you can stick a bunch of hard drives in and install FreeNAS FreeNAS: The Free NAS Server - Home

FreeNAS is a BSD based distro which allows you share any HDD you put in there as network attached storage. SMB, CIFS, AFP are all supported so should work fine in your environment.

jamil5454 · May 19, 2008, 01:27 PM

Fedora 9 was just released and it's really a nice OS. The PPC version should have no problems detecting the hardware on an oldish Mac.

Suse is great too... haven't used it since Novell bought it but either distro should be good, really.

besson3c · May 19, 2008, 02:22 PM

When you install it, I would think about installing a lightweight window manager such as Xfce rather than Gnome or KDE.

nonhuman · May 19, 2008, 05:11 PM

I don't really see any reason to use a window manager at all for a server. I'm going to be setting up my own FreeBSD server at home shortly (just need to borrow a monitor or something so I can run the install...), and I don't plan on installing X at all. The only possible reason I can think that I'd want it is in case I want to SSH in and use X forwarding to open up a window for some reason. But I can't really think of anything that I'd want to do that I could do either at the command line or by using local tools to edit remote files.

The desire to strip out unneeded elements is why I generally go with FreeBSD or Gentoo rather than one of the more 'user friendly' distros. I suppose Debian would work just as well, I've just never really been a huge fan.

besson3c · May 19, 2008, 05:29 PM

nonhuman: sounds good to me, I wouldn't install a window manager either... I know that many Mac users in here prefer to have one, which is why I assumed incorrectly that the same would apply to you

ntsc · May 20, 2008, 04:52 PM

yeah i'm leaning towards BSD type end, just because its more similar to Mac OS (and Solaris, where i cut my admining teeth

)

has anyone ever run into any particular OpenDir problems or afp type problems? conflicting file system conventions, multiple file stream issues, type creator codes breaking? i guess i'm just a little nervous deploying a 'pure' unix in a mac environment without Apple support.

thanks for bearing with my jitters!

besson3c · May 20, 2008, 05:02 PM

Regardless of what Unix/Linux system you work with, any non-Apple system is going to be using Netatalk to provide AFP. To the best of my knowledge, there area no OS specific issues with Netatalk, just version specific ones - Netatalk doesn't care what file system it writes to.

As far as differing file systems, HFS is the only one that does the goofy metadata thing it did prior to Tiger where certain file system metadata related functions started to support xattr. Xattr is available in other Unix/Linux OSes, but you may need to compile in kernel support and/or enable support for xattr in your /etc/fstab file depending on what file system and OS you are working with. I believe that Netatalk will create .AppleDouble directories for the purpose of re-associating non xattr metadata back to its original file when you copy a file from a Netatalk volume back to your Mac volume. I've never really needed to worry about Mac metadata, but if this is a concern for you you might want to test this. There isn't a whole lot of vital information saved as metadata anyway.

I don't have much experience with LDAP, but OpenLDAP should be OpenLDAP regardless of OS.

If you are going to go with FreeBSD, I would plan to go with FBSD 7.0, but I probably wouldn't bother with playing around with ZFS or file system journaling yet, these are both experimental, I believe. FreeBSD does softupdates by default to help prevent disk corruption. If you can attach a second drive to the server, I would suggest running the gmirror software RAID 1 to mirror the two drives for extra data redundancy... This works quite well!