titch Posted May 7, 2020 Posted May 7, 2020 So I've just bought an old xserve from eBay to use as a FileShare for our Mac Suite. We have a decent network and speedy San already bit have never successfully cracked using the windows shares for our Mac suite so I thought I would try a mini project. I have no experience of an old xserve 3,2 but was hoping I may be able to get some quick fire answers. Feel free to tell me I'm an idiot for trying to make such an old piece of kit work but the reasons I want to use it over a Mac mini are: -rack mountable -native raid -dual gigabit Questions are: 1. Am I stupid? Will this work? Is it worth it? 2. If it has a fibre card can the fibre card be used to connect to the network, or was it just designed for connecting to Xraid? 3. Can the CDROM drive be taken out and replaced with another HDD 4. Is it worth me mashing the OS to be able to bring the OS up to date just for a FileShare? Has there been any major changes recently that would make the FileShare better on a newer Mac OS 5. Can I just shove a bunch of 1tb SSD drives in and it be work? Or do I need apple drives? Any help or opinions gratefully received!
Norphy Posted May 7, 2020 Posted May 7, 2020 (edited) 1) Will it work? Yes. Will it work well? That’s another question. About five years ago now, the college that I worked for replaced an Xserve of that vintage with the last Mac Mini server that Apple produced. We attached it to a Thunderbolt drive array which had PCIe slots in there and put in a 10gbit NIC. I think it must have been a 4th gen Haswell i7 in the Mac Mini and a quad core Westmere Xeon in the Xserve but I can’t remember for sure. Anyway, the Mac Mini utterly destroyed the Xserve in just about every way imaginable. CPU was faster, RAM was faster, storage was faster. Network interfaces in the thunderbolt enclosure were fast enough 2) it will only work with storage controllers, it’s not a network interface 3) possibly but you’d need some kind of adapter to get it in there and you’d be limited to 2.5” drives. It’s probably only SATA2 s as well so 3gbit/sec 4) It’s always worth updating the OS as far as it will go but I wouldn’t attempt to hack the newest version of MacOS on there, that could be problematic 5) Yes, I put generic SATA drives into the Xserve we had The main question I’ve got is what are you planning to use it for? If it’s just fine shares, I’d say it’s not worth the effort to be honest, Macs have used SMB as their preferred file sharing protocol for a long time and Windows or Linux with SAMBA can handle that well enough. Unless there’s something Mac specific that you want to do (like host Time Machine backup’s, for example) Mac servers aren’t with the aggro any more. Edited May 7, 2020 by Norphy 1
titch Posted May 7, 2020 Author Posted May 7, 2020 Thanks that's really helpful and saved me a lot of time!
titch Posted May 7, 2020 Author Posted May 7, 2020 Maybe I will use this as proof of concept and look at a Mac Mini setup down the line. Intrigued how other schools share files over their Mac networks. Would love to use our current speedy SAN bits it's never worked as I would have hoped as I've only been able to setup windows file shares from it.
Arthur Posted May 7, 2020 Posted May 7, 2020 (edited) So I've just bought an old xserve from eBay There' still time to return it. 😉 Mac minis can be rack mounted too. With an xMac mini enclosure you can even add PCIe cards for Gigabit/10GbE and RAID. www.sonnettech.com/product/mac-mini-mounting-solutions/enclosures.html The only downside is the price and as Norphy mentioned it's not really worth it just for file sharing. Edited May 7, 2020 by Arthur 1
titch Posted May 7, 2020 Author Posted May 7, 2020 There' still time to return it. [emoji6] That made me chuckle. Maybe I'm being special but I've never really got SMB working as a file share for MACs. There always seems like some kind of hiccup along the way with a peace of software that just doesn't play nicely over the network, even when it's a fast backbone. I always assumed something MAC specific as a FileShare would sort those problems out?
geohanson Posted May 7, 2020 Posted May 7, 2020 Maybe I will use this as proof of concept and look at a Mac Mini setup down the line. Intrigued how other schools share files over their Mac networks. Would love to use our current speedy SAN bits it's never worked as I would have hoped as I've only been able to setup windows file shares from it. We used a 2012 Mac Mini ‘Server’ for a while for our music department macs. It was underpowered and too slow (with the original 2x 1TB 5400RPM drives) especially when students were trying to work with big Logic X projects. Last summer I replaced it with some HP DL380G8 servers (from ICT Direct), and upgraded the Mac Mini with a pair of SSDs and extra RAM. The Mac Mini now runs Profile Manager, and everything else (AD, DHCP, File Shares) are run from Windows Server 2019. All file shares are now on a big RAID10 array on the DL380s and everything seems to work great! We’ve just bought 2 new i3 Mac Minis to use as caching servers and they’ve been much more reliable than the 2014 models that have replaced. I’ve put them in one of the Sonnet rack mount enclosures - expensive for a bit of metal but at least you can fit them in a rack. My daily use machine is a 2018 Mac Mini i7 and it’s been brilliant so far. The 10GB network option isn’t too expensive either. I’d much rather use the new more up to date Mac mini than an obsolete XServe.... it’s a shame they didn’t continue producing a proper ‘server’ but I suppose now they’ve stripped the Server app back to almost nothing there wouldn’t be much of a need for one anyway. 1
titch Posted May 8, 2020 Author Posted May 8, 2020 Can I ask, did you do anything special with your windows shares to make them work successfully? Any chance of a basic rundown of filesystem and how you have them mounted in profile manager? Lastly how do the Mac minis work as a caching server? You couldn't point me in the right direction as to what this does? Thanks
geohanson Posted May 8, 2020 Posted May 8, 2020 Can I ask, did you do anything special with your windows shares to make them work successfully? Any chance of a basic rundown of filesystem and how you have them mounted in profile manager? Lastly how do the Mac minis work as a caching server? You couldn't point me in the right direction as to what this does? Thanks In the latest versions (can’t remember since when) MacOS has (sort of) deprecated the AFP protocol and the default has moved to SMB, making it Windows compatible. Our file shares are set up exactly how you would with Windows, and as all our MacOS users are in AD you can apply permissions in exactly the same way you can in Windows. We also apply quotas using FSRM. You should be able to browse to the file shares using Finder and connect to them using the relevant AD username and password. In order to actually ‘map’ the shared drives so they are easy to find, I used the profile manager (it’s basically doing what Group Policy would do) to create a shortcut on the dock for the relevant user groups. If you login as an IT admin, you get all the shares, login as a student and only the student share shows up. You can also choose which apps you want to appear on the dock and get rid of everything else. For the students/staff home folders, these are set in the AD property of each user. I think the option is called ‘Set home folder’ or something like that. Everything then by default is redirected as it can be in Windows, so when the user logs on and saves to their desktop, it actually saves back to their area on the server. There’s another option to do with local home drives you need to set that’s in the Directory Utility when you join the Mac to AD, but I can’t remember exactly what it is. In terms of caching servers, we have around 1600 iPads so when they try and download any updates it’s either very slow or will max out our internet bandwidth. When the user tries to download any iOS or MacOS update, the update will be downloaded and stored on the caching server. If another device wants the same update it’s then pulled straight from the caching server, and not from Apple. Setup complexity depends on how your vlans are configured, but it’s pretty straightforward to do. You can set them up in various configurations but we have 2 that load balance and will pull updates from each other as well. Each one is connected to the network at 10GB and has a RAID 0 SSD array connected to it. Saves us a ton of internet bandwidth and speeds up the update process as well. 1
titch Posted May 8, 2020 Author Posted May 8, 2020 Thanks so much for all that. I think I might give our SMB shares another go. Sounds like our setup is similar to yours but on a much smaller scale. Would it be a stupid idea to turn the caching on on our Mac that runs profile manager? Can you from there just point it at a share? Or is it better to just have a dedicated device. We have "Mac" vlan so should be good to go with that. Anyone wanna buy a xserve?
geohanson Posted May 8, 2020 Posted May 8, 2020 The caching would work on your Profile Manager server, just make sure you set it so it won’t use up all the disk space. It will obviously only cache for the Mac VLAN but I found it very useful when downloading all the extra content for Logic and GarageBand. Have a read of the official Apple documentation as The caching depends on your external IP and it’s a bit more complex to set up if you don’t have a static external IP. Hope you get it working!
Brimstone Posted May 20, 2020 Posted May 20, 2020 For more complex network configurations here are the links to guide on configuring caching server https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchleaf1e61d/10.15/mac/10.15 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchl9b56e1cf/10.15/mac/10.15 1
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now