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torifile
Less than Stellar Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Durham, NC
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2012-03-30, 06:04

Well, it's happened. My hackintosh experiment has come to an end. I can't upgrade my hack to Lion and I need Lion to be able to run the latest Xcode so I have to switch to a real Mac. It's too bad because my hack has lots of life left in it. So I would like to repurpose it as a file server. My house is wired with Cat 5e so speeds should be fine across the network.

I would like to use the computer to serve most of my media and house my Aperture library as well as serve as a time machine backup. It's running OS X 10.6.8 and Windows 7. I would still like to use it for PC gaming and being able to avoid rebooting would be nice, so Windows options are actually preferred. I could also be persuaded to run some Linux if it's best. Any thoughts?

If it's not red and showing substantial musculature, you're wearing it wrong.
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Partial
Stallion
 
Join Date: Feb 2006
Location: Milwaukee
 
2012-03-30, 09:41

Quote:
Originally Posted by torifile View Post
Well, it's happened. My hackintosh experiment has come to an end. I can't upgrade my hack to Lion and I need Lion to be able to run the latest Xcode so I have to switch to a real Mac. It's too bad because my hack has lots of life left in it. So I would like to repurpose it as a file server. My house is wired with Cat 5e so speeds should be fine across the network.

I would like to use the computer to serve most of my media and house my Aperture library as well as serve as a time machine backup. It's running OS X 10.6.8 and Windows 7. I would still like to use it for PC gaming and being able to avoid rebooting would be nice, so Windows options are actually preferred. I could also be persuaded to run some Linux if it's best. Any thoughts?
Machines can run SL but not Lion? That's surprising to me. Are you sure of this?
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torifile
Less than Stellar Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Durham, NC
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2012-03-30, 11:29

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Originally Posted by Partial View Post
Machines can run SL but not Lion? That's surprising to me. Are you sure of this?
I cannot get Lion to install no matter what I try and I've tried every possible solution I can find.
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2012-03-30, 16:58

I would run Win7 and VMware Workstation with a VM for Lion and a VM for a CentOS server. This will allow the best of all worlds. I'm this close to doing that with Beast myself. My install of SL is just problematic and I'm just not sure I'm interested in playing with it. I'll likely go with something like SME Server again for my file management as CentOS by itself isn't as hands-off as something like SME Server or FreeNAS.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
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torifile
Less than Stellar Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Durham, NC
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2012-03-30, 18:52

Tell me more about this VM Workstation thing. And why would I want to run CentOS over windows, etc?
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turtle
Lord of the Rant.
Formerly turtle2472
 
Join Date: Mar 2005
Location: Upstate South Carolina
 
2012-03-30, 20:49

Windows file sharing doesn't play as well with Macs. It can and does share, but not "Just working" like a linux system would. It also doesn't handle drives as well as a linux machine does. So expansion and RAID are more difficult. Plus, Win7 isn't really made to act as a server, the linux options I've mentioned are and this makes them better for what you're looking to do really. They really get to the point of set and forget. Less vulnerabilities etc...

A VM is just like another computer but running on your own, I'm pretty sure you know what this is since I seem to recall you mentioning Parallels in the past. Well, servers work just as well in a VM and can have drives allocated just to them. So your PC can be a gaming rig when you want and still run VMs for the NAS and even Mac OS. You can easily pause a VM and pick up where you left off with it if you need to reboot the PC for some reason.

That being said you need to really be sure to set the PC to never reboot on it's own. They tend to do that now for auto-patching. This doesn't make a VM happy. But this brings up the next awesome part of a VM, snapshot. Once you have the VM the way you want, take a snapshot. Now you can revert back to the snapshot if you ever need to. Doing an update? Take a snapshot and no worries.

My Media Center PC runs a VM with my family's private MC server as well as a VM with Lion and yet another with an FTP server I don't really use. So when it's not being used as a media center it's always ready to have us hop on and play MC in a private setting or let me test stuff with Lion without having to worry about messing up a good system.

Because the VMs move from PC to Mac with ease when using Workstation and Fusion I have pretty much stopped using Parallels. I still have it, but don't use it near as much now.

If it weren't for the fact that you want to game with the PC, I'd consider making it a Hypervisor system running all VMs. That gets more advanced (obviously) but brings with it so many perks too. I'm planning to do this in the future with some new hardware I have on my wish list. All my servers will be virtualized. So much more efficient use of hardware.

Louis L'Amour, “To make democracy work, we must be a nation of participants, not simply observers. One who does not vote has no right to complain.”
Visit our archived Minecraft world! | Maybe someday I'll proof read, until then deal with it.
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