PowerMac Networking Setups

[MicroTecture]

Hi people, I'm curious on hearing what you guys do for networking on a PowerMac.

It can be really just anything, some examples being: Any cool WiFi/BT related upgrades, multiple ethernet cards, network file-sharing, best web browsing setup, web-hosting, etc etc.. I'm curious on seeing what you guys have done in terms of networking on a PowerMac.

 

[eyoungren]

Hmmmm…well okay.

• PowerMac G3 B&W 450mhz: 2x Gigabit Ethernet NICs, plus the stock 10/100 port. Running 10.4.11 Server with an attached 2TB RAID (PCI-SATA card to eSATA). This Mac is my server. Headless (no monitor).

• PowerMac G4 500mhz: 1x Gigabit Ethernet NIC, plus stock 10/100 port. PCI-SATA card supports one 250GB boot drive (10.5.8) and two 3TB drives. This Mac is my 'NAS'. Headless (no monitor).

• 17" PowerBook G4: I use both the stock Gigabit port and a PC card that gives me 2.5/5Ghz WiFi support.

• 1 Airport Extreme with 2.5/5ghz bands: This is my secondary router, running in bridge mode. It was a Goodwill find and while I don't really 'need' it, it is useful from time to time. It plugs in to my 24 port switch so that takes some of the traffic off of my main router.

I tend to connect all my Macs using both ethernet and WiFi.

EDIT: In the two pics below of the PowerMac, the behind shot is from the G4 NAS and the front shot is the G3. Just so there is no confusion.

EDIT2: No one cares, but here it is anyway…the main router is a dual band ASUS RT-AC3200. It's Gigabit. The device behind it is a T-Mobile Cellspot 4G/LTE femtocel (V.2). It creates cellular signal and uses ethernet as backhaul to the T-Mobile network. The Netgear switch is a JGS524, ProSafe 24 Port Gigabit Switch and the modem is a Netgear Nightawk CM2000.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Nothing at all fancy.

Wireless n = C3000Z->5G & 2.4G
Legacy Wireless g = A1408 APE base station -> 2.4G -> Samsung 4Tb NAS
Ethernet = C3000Z -> BEFSR41 four port switch

Occasionally I will break out an A1264 for convenient ethernet on a wifi-less imac or similar. I use both wired and wireless on my PowerPC macs. I am a fan of the Dynex Wireless G pci cards for my Powermac G3 and G4s but do also use AP on my portables and APE on G5s.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

As far as PowerPC browsing set up, @wicknix 's InterwebPPC+BHF on 10.5.8 is my browser set up of choice, although I do use @z970 's webkit on 10.5.9 Sorbet as well. If you haven't tried Sorbet yet, it's very cool. Anyhow, my connection is garden variety DSL - again nothing fancy about that either.

 

[Doq]

I'm quite simple.

All PowerBooks connect via WiFi. While the Twelve and Companion can connect directly, the Titanium with its AirPort Not Extreme card can't do the WPA(2) that the newer machines can, and I have a 1st Gen AirPort Express that's configured for WEP (with hidden SSID) that pulls double duty as both a legacy AP and an AirPlay/AirTunes target.

The $6 eMac and the Beige Restoration Project don't have AirPort and connect via Ethernet to a switch in the server hallway: HP V1210-24.

EDIT2: No one cares, but here it is anyway…

As someone who dabbles in some light homelabbing I care very much.

 

[eyoungren]

As someone who dabbles in some light homelabbing I care very much.

👍

We got internet from our ISP in 2004 and I had a Fast Ethernet network (100mb) at home until 2018 when we moved. I took the opportunity during the move to purchase a new gigabit router and switch. The cable modem at that time was already Gigabit. We were down for a week anyway using our cellphones as hotspots so I just did it. It also meant I could upgrade to my ISP's fastest speed tier (Gigabit).

Between then and now the package offering from my ISP changed, so to stay on our speed tier, keep our TV channels and discounts I was forced to turn the ISP modem back in when they started charging me for it. Which is fine, I'd rather have my own modem anyway. But that needed to be DOCSIS 3.1 and Gigabit. I got the best Netgear one my ISP had approved on their list. Expensive, but I won't have to replace it for a very long time.

Since early 2020 when the pandemic hit I've been working from home (that's permanent, 'cause I asked for it to be) so it's vital that my service stay connected. I also pay extra for unlimited data so I don't have to worry about overages. Between my own stuff (generally full Mac CCC backups to Dropbox) and work I'm routinely pulling down over 1TB of data monthly.

I connect to a work VPN so I can access the work server directly. Pretty cool to be opening QuarkXPress documents, working on them and saving all done over the internet. Same for Photoshop, Acrobat and Illy files.

That's another reason I stick with the fastest speed tier. I can't imagine trying to do this on the budget version package. What my bosses pay for on their side, IDK, but I can only control my service.

 

[ervus]

2x Gigabit Ethernet NICs, plus the stock 10/100 port. Running 10.4.11 Server with an attached 2TB RAID (PCI-SATA card to eSATA).

What kind of transfer speeds can you get with this? Gigabit should be good for ~100MB/s, SATA should be good for much more, and PCI should be good for 133 or 266MB/s. Do you get anywhere near this?

 

[eyoungren]

What kind of transfer speeds can you get with this? Gigabit should be good for ~100MB/s, SATA should be good for much more, and PCI should be good for 133 or 266MB/s. Do you get anywhere near this?

I've never really tested it. However, I do have a inaccurate 'baseline' that I use. I spent 14.5 years at my old job and every Friday morning copied about 1.8 to 2GB from the server to my Mac. In the last few years that was a full Gigabit network with a Mac and PC server that both had Gigabit ports stock. The transfer took no more than 3 minutes. That's my 'baseline', 2GB in about 3 mins. That said, I believe I've seen a transfer rate around 45mbps (megabytes).

My G3 meets that. Copying 2GB (roughly) takes about 3 mins, whether it's to the RAID or from the RAID. I also connect to the server from inside my network only to the IP address of the second NIC. The first NIC is what the server defaults to for handling internet, time keeping, other server stuff, etc. So, the second NIC is just handling connections and file transfers - nothing else.

I know that because it's not all stock I'm not getting anywhere near the top performance as if this was all native. But I'm pretty happy with a 2GB transfer in 3 minutes.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I am in the somewhat delayed process of upgrading from 20mb ADSL to 120mb cable. There have been some delays with scaling up infrastructure in my area, so I am waiting for the isp to complete the needed upgrades prior to making the switch (existing customers in my neighborhood/on my street have experienced some outages that I'd like to avoid) but I expect that switch to occur this year.

Can't wait for that.

I have thought more than once about repurposing one of my powermacs, minis or macpro 1,1 as a media/backup server but just haven't gotten around to doing it. I'd love to have 8 or 10T in raid10 though. Maybe that 1,1 with all of its drive bays would be ideal for this purpose.

 

[Project Alice]

I don’t have much setup network wise with PPC Macs; but I have my network setup pretty well to work with them.
I have an early 2009 Intel Mac Mini that has squid on it to help with SSL. It also serves netboot and netinstalls of 10.2-10.6.8. It’s also a time machine target for backups on all my Leopard machines.

I do have a Mystic G4 (gigabit) that is setup as a NAS with x2 500GB SATA drives running in RAID0. I don’t use it as my main NAS but my main one is a little low on space so I keep less important things on it and sometimes copies of stuff on the other one that relates to PPC Macs. It’s a dual 500MHz G4 with 2GB ram and it just runs Leopard client 10.5.8.

 

[eyoungren]

I am in the somewhat delayed process of upgrading from 20mb ADSL to 120mb cable. There have been some delays with scaling up infrastructure in my area, so I am waiting for the isp to complete the needed upgrades prior to making the switch (existing customers in my neighborhood/on my street have experienced some outages that I'd like to avoid) but I expect that switch to occur this year.

Can't wait for that.

I have thought more than once about repurposing one of my powermacs, minis or macpro 1,1 as a media/backup server but just haven't gotten around to doing it. I'd love to have 8 or 10T in raid10 though. Maybe that 1,1 with all of its drive bays would be ideal for this purpose.

eBay typically has someone, somewhere, trying to get rid of a RAID enclosure or a NAS. That's a great place to start because all you need are disks (of equal capacity) and some sort of cable (USB, Firewire, eSATA). Enclosures take care of creating and managing the RAID based on your (typically) hardcoded setting (a switch on the enclosure somewhere). A NAS will have a login interface where you can control things yourself. All your Mac does is mounts and shares the drive(s).

I picked up another RAID enclosure a few weeks ago. I have three now. The first two are limited to 2TB, while this third one is very expandable. I forget what it's limit is but I know I can drop two large (beyond 8TB) drives in there. My NAS is limited to 2x 3TB, so a 6TB NAS.

With this attached to your Mac you've got a 'server' or 'glorified NAS' you can share. With an actual NAS, it just needs to be plugged in to your network. Enclosures tend to be cheaper.

This is how I'm handling my G3 Server. It shares a 2TB RAID drive to my network.

Re: DSL to cable. No idea what the providers are in your area, but in mine the primary DSL provider is garbage. I've worked for two employers who had DSL from that provider and they consistently had outages - particularly after it had rained. I've had very few cable outages. I am no more loyal to my cable ISP than any other company, but it has a monopoly here and at least its decent. They've always worked with me to get me discounts over the years and they've bumped up speeds before without charge.

Hopefully your transition goes well!

 

[MicroTecture]

What kind of transfer speeds can you get with this? Gigabit should be good for ~100MB/s, SATA should be good for much more, and PCI should be good for 133 or 266MB/s. Do you get anywhere near this?

I was considering getting an SIL3124 card, someone on Reddit confirmed like ~180MB/s? on SATA with an OEM card that has the SIL3124, flashed with a firmware that goes to a PCI SATA card (Sonnet Tempo? something like that??) to get it to work in his Sawtooth.

I don't know where to find a SIL3124 card to do such with. I was hoping maybe faster might exist.
I'm looking for a SIL3124 card that is PCI-X because there would be a higher bandwidth advantage when you consider most/all PowerMac G4's PCI slot speeds. PCI-X is backwards compatible.

I'll keep looking around for a PCI SATA solution that can offer high speeds.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

I was considering getting an SIL3124 card, someone on Reddit confirmed like ~180MB/s? on SATA with an OEM card that has the SIL3124, flashed with a firmware that goes to a PCI SATA card (Sonnet Tempo? something like that??) to get it to work in his Sawtooth.

I don't know where to find a SIL3124 card to do such with. I was hoping maybe faster might exist.
I'm looking for a SIL3124 card that is PCI-X because there would be a higher bandwidth advantage when you consider most/all PowerMac G4's PCI slot speeds. PCI-X is backwards compatible.

I'll keep looking around for a PCI SATA solution that can offer high speeds.

Another solution that has worked for me is the sil3512 pci sata controller flashed with a weibetech utility. That was my way of bringing large drive support to my B&W Powermac G3. One caveat - to use on a Quicksilver or Digital Audio Powermac g4s, you'll need to swap the voltage regulator from 5v to 3.3v for functionality. Stock flashed cards will not boot in those respective boxes otherwise.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

eBay typically has someone, somewhere, trying to get rid of a RAID enclosure or a NAS. That's a great place to start because all you need are disks (of equal capacity) and some sort of cable (USB, Firewire, eSATA). Enclosures take care of creating and managing the RAID based on your (typically) hardcoded setting (a switch on the enclosure somewhere). A NAS will have a login interface where you can control things yourself. All your Mac does is mounts and shares the drive(s).

I picked up another RAID enclosure a few weeks ago. I have three now. The first two are limited to 2TB, while this third one is very expandable. I forget what it's limit is but I know I can drop two large (beyond 8TB) drives in there. My NAS is limited to 2x 3TB, so a 6TB NAS.

With this attached to your Mac you've got a 'server' or 'glorified NAS' you can share. With an actual NAS, it just needs to be plugged in to your network. Enclosures tend to be cheaper.

This is how I'm handling my G3 Server. It shares a 2TB RAID drive to my network.

Re: DSL to cable. No idea what the providers are in your area, but in mine the primary DSL provider is garbage. I've worked for two employers who had DSL from that provider and they consistently had outages - particularly after it had rained. I've had very few cable outages. I am no more loyal to my cable ISP than any other company, but it has a monopoly here and at least its decent. They've always worked with me to get me discounts over the years and they've bumped up speeds before without charge.

Hopefully your transition goes well!

That would certainly be the easiest and if for no other reason other than time, I may utilize a hardware solution but am wanting a large amount of data storage for family pictures, videos, centralized music library, movie library etc. What back up software do you use or is it Time Machine?

In regards to family photos, videos etc, maybe I should take advantage of a cloud service as the accessibility, redundancy, resiliency, affordability etc. would almost assuredly be better than anything I could employ at home on a non-professional budget. I could focus my at home NAS around a size of say, 4T with its intent being hosting a centralized music catalog, movie catalog and a modest catalog of vintage osx/classic/win software.

 

[eyoungren]

That would certainly be the easiest and if for no other reason other than time, I may utilize a hardware solution but am wanting a large amount of data storage for family pictures, videos, centralized music library, movie library etc. What back up software do you use or is it Time Machine?

In regards to family photos, videos etc, maybe I should take advantage of a cloud service as the accessibility, redundancy, resiliency, affordability etc. would almost assuredly be better than anything I could employ at home on a non-professional budget. I could focus my at home NAS around a size of say, 4T with its intent being hosting a centralized music catalog, movie catalog and a modest catalog of vintage osx/classic/win software.

Well, I will just lay out my backup scenario.

I use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up each Mac to a sparse disk image inside a backup folder on my NAS. Those are daily backups and each Mac is set to do it's own. I use disk images because with SMB sharing things tend to get wonky with sparse bundles.

On my Mac Pro I have a 3TB drive that is where my Dropbox folder resides. I pay Dropbox $28 monthly for 4TB of space (yes, I need to get a 4TB drive). Anyway, I also use Carbon Copy Cloner to back up each Mac to another sparse disk image inside a backup folder in my Dropbox folder which is on my MP's 3TB drive. These are WEEKLY backups and they are all scheduled to go off on the weekend (Friday to Sunday). I use disk images for the same reason as above, plus Dropbox tends to treat sparse bundles as separate folders. That makes restores fail most of the time - so disk images. Again, this is done by each Mac.

So, each Mac has a DAILY and a WEEKLY job using CCC.

Now, Catalina, doesn't seem to like CCC backups of APFS SSDs to network drive images. So, I use Time Machine on my wife's Air and on my MBP. That goes to the NAS on TM's schedule.

The lone PC I have uses a different app and makes weekly backups to that Dropbox folder on my MP. It's weekly because I don't really use the PC, so I don't need it to backup over and over the same stuff on a daily basis.

The idea here is that should a drive on one of my Macs ever fail and God forbid, the NAS fails (which has my daily backups), there is a BACKUP ON DROPBOX!

I lose a week worth of data should this ever happen, but at least I do not lose everything.

EDIT: My NAS and backup locations…



Now if everything else fails AND Dropbox also fails, then I think the techworld has a much bigger problem on it's hands. That is highly unlikely.

 

[Certificate of Excellence]

Hmm, I had not thought of using CCC as a back up utility as I've exclusively employed it for drive cloning however as you describe your set up, it sounds quite elegant. I will have to give it a few test runs and see how I like it. In regards to using time machine, I have in the past noticed that TM drops backups to the assigned partition, so if you keep say 10 macs backing up to the same (lets say 2T) drive/partition, all the machines would be dumping backups on top of each other into one partition. How would you keep this organized? It makes sense to me to create 10 partitions on that drive but I was curious how you guys keep mass-backups organized? What methodology/convention do you use?

 

[eyoungren]

Hmm, I had not thought of using CCC as a back up utility as I've exclusively employed it for drive cloning however as you describe your set up, it sounds quite elegant. I will have to give it a few test runs and see how I like it. In regards to using time machine, I have in the past noticed that TM drops backups to the assigned partition, so if you keep say 10 macs backing up to the same (lets say 2T) drive/partition, all the machines would be dumping backups on top of each other into one partition. How would you keep this organized? It makes sense to me to create 10 partitions on that drive but I was curious how you guys keep mass-backups organized? What methodology/convention do you use?

In the past, PowerPC TM backups were to sparse disk images. So, they got kept separate. The reason I abandoned TM backups is that it did not make it easy to move those disk images around. Also, any time I moved them TM wanted to start a brand new full on backup even if I put the old disk image back in the same place. I finally said 'To heck with it'.

The TM backups that Catalina is doing are going to the root of the drive, in a sparse bundle that has the name of the user account and computer name. Older TM backups use a filename that has the computer name and the MAC address of the interface you are using (WiFi, ethernet, etc). I've not yet investigated if there is a way to move the newer type of TM backups to a specific folder.

CCC allows you to do scheduled backups. Here is how it looks on Mojave and on Leopard (PowerPC).

 

[eyoungren]

In regards to family photos, videos etc, maybe I should take advantage of a cloud service as the accessibility, redundancy, resiliency, affordability etc. would almost assuredly be better than anything I could employ at home on a non-professional budget. I could focus my at home NAS around a size of say, 4T with its intent being hosting a centralized music catalog, movie catalog and a modest catalog of vintage osx/classic/win software.

Quoting you again, just to respond directly to this part. I've been using Dropbox since 2009, so it was natural for me to go with them - especially since I use their app on all my phones. With the space I pay for, it allows me to back up directly to them, even systems that not longer support Dropbox (because they are saving to a shared volume that has the Dropbox folder in it on a supported Mac).

There are other services, but I know some like SpiderOak limit your transfer amounts. Even with the free service Dropbox has never put a limit on how much you can transfer at any time or per file.

I can also do a bare metal restore directly from that drive holding my Dropbox folder if I need to. Because the backup files are disk images.

So, Dropbox is just what works for me. Plenty of others out there who may be a better fit for your needs.

 

[MicroTecture]

Another solution that has worked for me is the sil3512 pci sata controller flashed with a weibetech utility. That was my way of bringing large drive support to my B&W Powermac G3. One caveat - to use on a Quicksilver or Digital Audio Powermac g4s, you'll need to swap the voltage regulator from 5v to 3.3v for functionality. Stock flashed cards will not boot in those respective boxes otherwise.

Was it PCI-X? What speeds do you get with this solution?

 

[MicroTecture]

In the past, PowerPC TM backups were to sparse disk images. So, they got kept separate. The reason I abandoned TM backups is that it did not make it easy to move those disk images around. Also, any time I moved them TM wanted to start a brand new full on backup even if I put the old disk image back in the same place. I finally said 'To hell with it'.

The TM backups that Catalina is doing are going to the root of the drive, in a sparse bundle that has the name of the user account and computer name. Older TM backups use a filename that has the computer name and the MAC address of the interface you are using (WiFi, ethernet, etc). I've not yet investigated if there is a way to move the newer type of TM backups to a specific folder.

CCC allows you to do scheduled backups. Here is how it looks on Mojave and on Leopard (PowerPC).

View attachment 1998163 View attachment 1998164

Sorry, this is unrelated but how did you get that macOS button scheme on Leopard? It looks cool!

 

[eyoungren]

Sorry, this is unrelated but how did you get that macOS button scheme on Leopard? It looks cool!

It is a combination of a Deviant Art theme called Black Mac OS X and a Candybar set of icons/dock.

Black Mac OS X

Over the time I've been here, there have been a few enquiries about the black theme I use on my Macs. I've put up a few pieces as asked, but now I am going to post everything here in this thread and leave it up. Firstly, I use Magnifique and the Black OS X theme. Don't ask me how I tracked this...

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