I’m thinking about using a G5 tower as a staging server instead of the 50lb paper weight it currently is. I want to be able to move projects from local dev > staging (so clients can view it) > remote. The problem is I don’t know what’s involved to do this or if it’s worth the effort. Can someone explain what needs to happen?
Todd
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Here is one company’s configuration info for their G5. Not much else info wise but probably open to probing for more info.
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Fun times ahead! I’ve run staging servers as a hobby since the late '90s, first on a donated PowerMac 900 or something like that, then a blue and white G3, then a G4 (which finally died this year!) and also a G5 Xserve Cluster Node I found on eBay for $900.
There’s a couple of different schools of thought here. One is to go All Apple, and put a copy of Mac OS X Server, or Mac OS X and Tenon iTools, or just Mac OS X (and a lot of command-line-fu, or maybe WebMin). The only difference between these options is ease of administration. Mac OS X is a popular developer platform (maybe 90% at the conference I went to this past Saturday) so there’s lots of support and recipes abound for compiling just about anything. The trouble is, most of that support is for Intel, and it’s getting harder to find recipes that include the architecture flags for PPC.
Another option is to find (and probably compile) a copy of Linux or OpenBSD for PowerPC. Much yak-shaving there, but in the end, you would have a much closer simulacrum of your hosting server. You’ll still have some issues with libraries not being available for your server, but you would probably find that this was more accurate in terms of staging.
But for the amount of time that either of these is going to take, my money any more is on a cheap VPS somewhere. The whole point of staging is to work out the bugs, and when your hosting platform – even your processor – is different than the production server, you really don’t know why something doesn’t work, and you can end up spending a lot of expensive time discovering that your copy of ImageMagick is missing some tiny bit somewhere, and you can’t have it because your server doesn’t have Intel Inside. (As I have done.)
Walter
On Oct 24, 2011, at 6:38 PM, Todd wrote:
I’m thinking about using a G5 tower as a staging server instead of the 50lb paper weight it currently is. I want to be able to move projects from local dev > staging (so clients can view it) > remote. The problem is I don’t know what’s involved to do this or if it’s worth the effort. Can someone explain what needs to happen?
Todd
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But for the amount of time that either of these is going to take, my money any more is on a cheap VPS somewhere.
I agree VPS is probably the best route for several reasons but the fact is I really don’t want to pay for it, inexpensive though it may be and it pains me to have a beautiful G5 collecting dust. Anyway, it was just a thought, nothing more.
Todd
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At 19:43 -0500 24/10/11, Todd wrote:
But for the amount of time that either of these is going to take,
my money any more is on a cheap VPS somewhere.I agree VPS is probably the best route for several reasons but the
fact is I really don’t want to pay for it, inexpensive though it may
be and it pains me to have a beautiful G5 collecting dust. Anyway,
it was just a thought, nothing more.
I run Apache with PHP, and MySQL on all of my Macs except an old PPC
mini I recently ‘inherited’ and my wife’s iBook. I’m not running a
server version of OS X so I don’t have the easy-admin tools, but if
you’re not afraid of wandering off the Finder-presented paths it’s
not difficult. As Walter says, it’s not a real likeness of your ISP,
but it’s good enough for most purposes. If you need details, ask, and
I’ll try to remember.
David
–
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
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Here’s an interesting new option:
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Why on earth go this length to host on a mac? I should go with a BSD variant on more popular (thus better supported) hardware.
Yust my 2…
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