Paperless project gets an upgrade, LAN gets a new server
Posted on November 18, 2006
Filed Under All, Technology, Gulker labs |
Yesterday I took the train to Palo Alto as usual, but did not head for the Marguerite B Counterclockwise line bus waiting at the Palo Alto Transportation Center. Rather, I took the tunnel under the tracks and made my way East to the Apple Store on University. Linda had a meeting that made it convenient for her to pick me up in Pally, and I had a little time to kill. I also had a plan.
At the Apple store I moved deliberately through the acres of iPod accessories (faux leopard fur iPod Shuffle case, anyone?) to the small disk storage section at the back, adjacent to the Genius bar. At one point I managed to walk along the back wall behind the Genius Bar (there were no barricades or other indications that this was not OK), but got a really hard look from one of the Geniuses. Guess being a Genius is hard work that demands total concentration: no encroaching Genius space, please!
Any way, our goal was a 500GB La Cie drive in an enclosure that matches the Mac Mini. It also expands the number of USB and Firewire ports: particularly useful with the G4 Mac Mini which sports not many such ports. The real plan involves adding the 500 GB of storage - cheap at $299, less than $1/GB - to the G4 Mini’s paltry 80 GB HD, which is rapidly being chewed up by the Paperless Project’s scans. I’m unhappy wyth my cheap, NAS drives, the current storage solution. They drop off the network randomly, and saving large collections of Mac files is problematic, since the NAS drives are SMB, and only accept Windows file name conventions. If they hit a Mac character they don’t like, they stop copying. It can take a long time to save even relatively small directories to the 1/2 terabyte array.
Mac OS X, and Mac OS X server are really very similar OSes. There are complete, and pretty admin tools for OS X server, unlike OS X, and that’s part of the problem. OS X server wants you to do deal with the server’s UNIX guts, in great detail, which is mostly not what I want to do, especialy since some of those tools (DNS manager) are pretty broken. I’m thinking the G4 Mini is a likely peachy LAN server that will handle Intranet, file and print quite handily, and be much easier to manage. Geek details TK…
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3 Responses to “Paperless project gets an upgrade, LAN gets a new server”
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I guess it’s a little late for recommendations for this phase of your system upgrade, but I recently bought a beautiful Infrant ReadyNAS NV with four 400GB drives in a RAID array. It supports AFP3 perfectly (as well as SMB and NFS). Mac support even extends to a Dashboard widget for monitoring the state of the hardware and a built-in iTunes server. The icing on the cake is that it even looks like something Apple might manufacture.
Genius Bar . . .
I don’t recall such at the Chi-town Apple store on my recent visit, but then Chi is not the Valley.
Just wondering . . . is the Bar a venue, or a hurdle, like those hiring ones I read about - and does genius want company, as in a saloon? Or does it require membership?
Anyway, hope your paperless project doesn’t cost much more. I’m sure you’re learning alot, but for the cost so far, it will be interesting to see what the ultimate cost/benefit analysis is.
Sounds like Apple Store over there is much like the one here, 90 per cent iPods and iPod accessories, 10 per cent useful stuff. I already have one LaCie mini drive and am looking at getting another one, but have only seen the 350GB version on this side of the pond. So will wait for the bigger one to arrive over here. Need all the space I can get since I got a Miglia TV mini (best gadget I ever bought), to hold an every expanding video library. Also recommend this Belkin hub for your mini stack. OMG, did I just recommend something made by Belkin?