Apple

Anyone using this? I just finished tussling with weird behavior on my old Leopard G5 Server and DroboPro iSCSI array. Figured, this would be a low cost way to replace the G5 with an Intel 2.66Ghz dual core XEON running (GASP!) modern softwares!!

I am running it on 10.10(.4?) using vpn, time machine, smb, and I want to say update caching but we only have 3 macs at the office and the rest are PC-heads. It is our main server and seems to be working well. Our mechanical engineer hits the SMB hard but other than that it has an easy life... I also use the box as a git host and itunes server. The only thing I can take issue with is that OSX UPS support is broken.

I haven't had to log into the thing in months, so I'd say it's working pretty well!

If you want to set it and forget it for basic tasks you will like it. If you need to do fancy stuff you should probably look elsewhere. But there isn't really an easy way otherwise to get a VPN server on a mac. It's possible but, kind of beyond my skills without the server app I mean, for twenty bucks you don't have much to lose just trying it out...

Sounds perfect! I have a houseful of nothing but Apple computes, so it should work great - also a 20kw generator so UPS isn't strictly a problem :-)

The feature set for OSX Server looks ideal for me, especially the caching.

Anyone use Xsan4 over Ethernet? Don't I need a client? Never heard of StorNext...

Xsan is a powerful and scalable solution for storage consolidation. Everyone in your organization can have fast, concurrent access to terabytes of centralized data. Built into OS X, Xsan allows any Mac to access Xsan or StorNext volumes over Fibre Channel or Ethernet.

sky, iirc xsan needs a separate run of fiber (in addition to the ethernet cabling) to work correctly though you probably have one running around the house already?
the coens use xsan for their in-house stuff and they're happy with it, a few of my favourite post-spots too. quite solid every time i use it (though i've never built one myself). i could ask for details if you'd like

We installed a mac mini server 10.6 for an accounting company running Windows 7 Clients. It was brilliant, mail, vpn, unlimited clients etc they started with minimal things set up and increased the features along the way.
All was good, until they started having files go missing (they accessed files once a year so to speak). They blamed OSX server so we moved them to Windows 2008 (I have the Mac now). So same things happened again, and I can't quite recall if we set file auditing up, but anyway, we found they had a rouge employee deleting files... BUT.. OSX server was really great, but I read reviews of the later add-on versions and they were not good.

In fact, I have just found my install disks and might get that mac Mini doing what it was born to do... SERVE!

Just to be clear: Sky are you asking about the "OS X Server" add-on available for $19.99 through the App Store? Currently v5.1, which requires OS X 10.11.4?

They stopped offering the non-add-on version quite a few years ago now, right?

smj wrote: They stopped offering the non-add-on version quite a few years ago now, right?

They did indeed. Change your desktop into a server they said!!! Oh and use it as a desktop at the same time as well..

smj wrote: Just to be clear: Sky are you asking about the "OS X Server" add-on available for $19.99 through the App Store? Currently v5.1, which requires OS X 10.11.4?

They stopped offering the non-add-on version quite a few years ago now, right?

That's what the title says :-) more or less. I have 10.5 server, I figured out the problem with TimeMachine, or I should say TimeMachine figured it out; it burbled something about reliability and rewrote the backup. Something I had done several times. TM server just up and stops running my iMac every so often - I have to reboot Server and the Drobo subsystem to get it going again. Time to upgrade to something different. I bought an old Intel Mac Pro, another Drobo Pro, and Apple server (App Store) to run TM backups on. I'll keep the G5 Leopard server around, it runs well with Quad Core G5 running Final Cut Pro. They both have a ton of memory in them too. I have to get more for the most recent Mac Pro, it only had 2GB in it.

Still working on getting the parts for a Mac Server 5.1 setup. Meanwhile reading the Manual yields this out-of-touch paragraph:

Supported operating systems
Computers with OS X Yosemite can be used as Xsan 4.0 metadata controllers and clients.
Computers with OS X El Capitan can be used as Xsan 4.1 metadata controllers and clients.
To join an Xsan 4.0 or 4.1 SAN, Windows, AIX, IRIX, Linux , and Solaris clients must be running Quantum’s StorNext File System.

Irix? Really? Are we really serious, or did we forget to update some text from the 90's.

StorNext 3.5.x supports IRIX and was available on 6.5.30. Support ended mid-2014.

@robespierre, well that's no fun. :-)

Hmm, actually I ended up with 4 DroboPro's (32 drive slots). They're not sceaming fast, but ease of use (self managed Raid 5/6) for online-backup, or Media storage for iTunes and DVD's, or just moderate performance Fileservering; I haven't seen anything close it. I have enough slots for 64TB.

Maybe I could write a I/O striping shim to strip the Drobo's, that would be more than enough to saturate a 1GB wire. I'm using one Ethernet port for the Network, and the other as an iSCSI link to the 4 Drobo's Ethernet ports through a switch. Unfortunately, any management has to go to all Drobo's, so you're have to know which transfer are management and which are I/O. Worse yet, there is some finagling between the host management software format, and the Drobo's internal noodling at the block level (or somekind of block representation) that inexplicably prevents the user from formatting it any other way - in fact you CAN'T format it - it HAS to be formatted with their management software. Weird.

I don't suppose you can do static trunking or link aggregation (LAG) on 2 ports of the Mac Pro and the switch? Then I could put the Drobo's on FireWire ports, and use LAG to allow for more network bandwidth to flow through 4 FW800 ports.

Oh and yeah! I got a 2nd ReadyNAS Pro 6. These things are KICK ASS fast! But difficult to find on Ebay - nobody gets rid of them. Especially the Pro 6 Business Edition which supports iSCSI - which is the first one I bought. I've clocked the iSCSI from this baby (which BTW connects to my Netgear GS724T/24 port Gigabit switch which uses LAG) going at 109MB/Sec, nice!

Any of youz guyz ever use sync with OS X? I would like to backup the ReadyNAS 6's with sync to some of the Drobo devices.

skywriter wrote: Any of youz guyz ever use sync with OS X? I would like to backup the ReadyNAS 6's with sync to some of the Drobo devices.

What exactly do you mean by sync? I googled around and it seems like a feature from ReadyNAS, but I don't see to clearly get your question. Why would you need OS X to backup ReadyNAS to Drobo? Is the Drobo locally attached to the OS X machine?

Sorry, it dropped the r in sync. Thanks!

all sleek+tidy like your music-room sky

i could cut a short with your infrastructure :)

Thank for the info Shiunbird! If I can get the Drobo Pro's working with El Capitan, then that storage may qualify as local storage - unless they mean internal storage, an while not blazingly fast they as orders of faster than going out on the cable again. If that's the case then a brace of old 1TB HD's plexed in the three extra drive bays isn't onerous; newegg is always running a deal on refurbished disks.

I already considered 3rd party iSCSI as a forgone conclusion. The (3) dual ported ReadyNAS boxes support a spritely iSCSI, as well as CIFS, NFS and AFS, and jumbo frames.

Stupid question for you; do you configure the server inline with the network - between the router/cable modem and the. Rest of the network. Or can it be placed like any other server as a leaf node. The former seems reasonable, but I've seen the latter in a diagram.

fu wrote: all sleek+tidy like your music-room sky

i could cut a short with your infrastructure :)

If you've seen it lately, you could do more than a short! I have the last Final Pro for Intel as well, and Final Pro X (for what it's worth) :-) I have a huge Blue Mic collection - it's magnificent!

Welp, I put three 2TB drives in and created a RAID 0 Volume, Server Caching took it fine, and I already have some downloads in the cache. This should help a lot since there is so much Apple gear here :-) Only having to go once to corporate will save a bunch!

@skywriter: You are welcome!

I've heard the video loopback helps to get remote screen at more than 800x600. I've never tested, though. I have no need.
My G5 doesn't like to be started without any display attached. The fans fly and it seems to never boot up. I always have a display attached, so I was never bothered to solve this problem.

I run El Captain on a 2011 Mac Mini (the one with AMD graphics). It's behind a Cisco RV042 and the ports are forwarded. I use the Cisco to allow the forwarding to happen based on a schedule (I can only connect to VPN during business hours).

If the Drobo mounts as local storage, everything should work fine. I don't know much about it. I suppose it's Thunderbolt?
It boils my blood that you can't use any mounted storage for the services. They must have a very good reason for that. My NAS server (FreeNAS on a Gen8 HP MicroServer) is far more stable than my Mac Mini and is always available.

I was looking into getting a Drobo myself, but I don't need the performance and I find the MicroServer + FreeNAS combo to be more cost effective and more useful for my use cases.