Alright here's the problem. I've got an old G3 Power Mac that I picked up cheaply from an acquaintance. Unfortunately he did not know the root password so I'm unable to gain root access to it. I'm also unable to connect it to the Internet from my network as I need alter the routing tables first for which I need root access. OK, so I need to boot from CD so that I can get root access except in order to boot from a CD I need to download a file from the 'net. In other words in order to connect to the 'net I need to gain root access by booting from a CD after downloading a file from the 'net once I gain root access..... ad naseum. OK, not to worry, here's a list of my main resources: 1 Internet-connected Linux box with a full Slackware installation, 1 headless Linux box running an Apache web server and little else, 1 headless Linux box running an NFS server and little else. And of course all four machines are networked together. What do you do? Solution: From the first machine (let's call it the main machine) download the file. Then mount the shared directory from the NFS server and upload said file. Then from the main machine ssh into the web server. Then from the ssh session mount the shared directory from the NFS server onto the web server and copy said file onto the web server. Then write a short HTML file that contains a link to the file in the web servers HTML directory. Then from the Mac start up web browser and point it to the web server, click on the link, download it and voila! Genius! I realise half of you probably have no idea what I'm on about but I had to tell somebody!
Hahahaha... really, sounds like day-to-day administration gone awry. Cool that you got it up though! How fast is the CPU, how much RAM (PC-100 SDRAM I assume?) and what version of MacOS is it running? I'm actually thinking about buying a PowerBook so I can support OS X, the one OS I really don''t know very well. My fear though is that I'll end up forking over $1,700 for a stupid PPC laptop just to end up throwing Linux on it. In that case, I could just buy an $800 x86 laptop without Windows and have a better performing Linux laptop... I'll just have to restrain myself I guess. hah:
300MHz CPU, 192MB Ram, Mac OS X ver 10.2.8. It's a pretty decent machine though I'm already bored with the eye candy and it doesn't seem very tweakable, and I probably spend more time in a terminal screen then your average Mac user (sorry, I just not used to browsing a filesystem in a GUI app!). I was thinking about chucking out the OS and putting Gentoo on it but I think I'll keep OS X on it for a bit so that I can get to know it a bit better (it's based on BSD right?) and knowing me I'll probably pick up a second one somewhere to experiment with Linux PPC. First, though, I'll need to buy a new hub as my one has run out of ports!
Hey, that's a pretty nice machine for that generation of Mac. I know what you mean about eye candy. Everybody's all excited about Avalon and all that, but how long will the novelty last? Is it worth the several hundred dollars for tons of added bloat and no real improvements? Anyway, I'm ranting and off topic, two strikes for me. It's not really based on BSD so much as NeXtStep, but it does have a tweaked BSD kernel which is fairly cool. In fact, I have very few complaints with the BSD kernel one of which being dog slow forking, but that doesn't come into play much except with heavy server apps (one reason Macs kinda suck as servers). Anyway, I envy your luck for coming across a good deal like that. Even used that system would go for $250-$500 here in the US, since they can still run OS X.
Thanks, I was actually thinking of using it as a web server as it seems to have Apache and a lot of web-development packages installed but not any more! Yeah, mind you I'm spending more on hardware than I am on food at the moment so I'm not sure where this is all leading to. Pretty soon I'l have to chuck out my bed to make more room!
