network a Performa to store stuff?

[asherman13]

this is kinda a "help" thread but...

i have an old mac performa 6400 180mhz with an ethernet card and a 60GB hard drive. can i, and if so, how would i, hook it up to my house's network so we can store stuff on it, like backups of ipod videos, etc.?

i'm pretty sure it's running os 8.6, and i'm running osx 10.4.3, as is our family imac.

EDIT there's also some sizable RAM, not sure how much though...

any ideas?

 

[Anonymous Freak]

this is kinda a "help" thread but...

i have an old mac performa 6400 180mhz with an ethernet card and a 60GB hard drive. can i, and if so, how would i, hook it up to my house's network so we can store stuff on it, like backups of ipod videos, etc.?

i'm pretty sure it's running os 8.6, and i'm running osx 10.4.3, as is our family imac.

EDIT there's also some sizable RAM, not sure how much though...

any ideas?

Turn on file sharing (In the 'File Sharing' Control Panel,) select the folder you want to share, go to 'File -> Sharing', and enable sharing for that folder. You're set to go. Just make sure you have AppleTalk turned on in the network preferences on the Tiger machine. (It's off by default.)

edit: Or, if you can find a copy of OS X 10.2 or lower, you can use XPostFacto (Google for it,) to install OS X on that Performa, and have an all-X network. (I have run OS X on machines as low as a PMac 8500/100. It's plenty fast for file-serving duties; but I wouldn't want to use it for anything else.)

 

[asherman13]

Turn on file sharing (In the 'File Sharing' Control Panel,) select the folder you want to share, go to 'File -> Sharing', and enable sharing for that folder. You're set to go. Just make sure you have AppleTalk turned on in the network preferences on the Tiger machine. (It's off by default.)

edit: Or, if you can find a copy of OS X 10.2 or lower, you can use XPostFacto (Google for it,) to install OS X on that Performa, and have an all-X network. (I have run OS X on machines as low as a PMac 8500/100. It's plenty fast for file-serving duties; but I wouldn't want to use it for anything else.)

can i remove the display so that its just used for file storage?

EDIT the site for xpostfacto says i can run tiger...but apparently i need 9.x? and i don't think i can run it on the performa; it doesn't say that it's supported...

EDIT2 using the control panel, can i share the whole computer? or just one file?

 

[asherman13]

could i remove the HDD and put it in a firewire enclosure for use as an external hard drive? we haven't used it in a few years...

 

[balamw]

could i remove the HDD and put it in a firewire enclosure for use as an external hard drive? we haven't used it in a few years...

I've done a variation of this for archiving data from even older Macs. I pulled the drives on a couple of Mac IIs. used dd to create an image of the drive on a SCSI enabled linux box and emulate the whole Mac on any Linux/Windows box using Basilisk II. This was for <120 MB drives so it was even very easy to dump the whole emulator and drive image to a CD.

For your 60GB drive, an external enclosure should be a better option, but I am not sure if there are any incompatibilities lurking between HFS from OS 8 and OS X. These might be more of an issue if you wanted to put the drive back in the Performa.

Any way to force OS X to mount an external drive read only? This would allow you to try it with minimal risk.

B

 

[Xeem]

You shouldn't need to do anything to make it work; Mac OS 8.6 will network fine with OS X. I was using a PowerCenter Pro (running Mac OS 8.1) networked with our family Cube about a year or so ago, and although I never installed the version of Open Transport that allowed me to connect to OS X shares from the PowerCenter, the OS X machines could read/write/share internet with the PowerCenter just fine.

 

[asherman13]

thanks for your help, everybody. i have to poll my household and see if anybody'd be interested in saving stuff to the network, otherwise i think i might make an external HD out of the performa.

FYI FOR MODERATORS, ETC.: i've had experiance when posting in the "basics/help" forum that there aren't many people viewing them, and, after i posted it there, thought i should post it in the other forum. i realized my error, as people responded to both. my apologies.

 

[RHutch]

I have had no problems when networking several Power Mac 6500's running 8.1 through 9.0 with my PB and PMG4 running 10.2, 10.3, and 10.4. I have been able to read from and write to the drives in the Power Macs.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

can i remove the display so that its just used for file storage?

Yes.

EDIT the site for xpostfacto says i can run tiger...but apparently i need 9.x? and i don't think i can run it on the performa; it doesn't say that it's supported...

Unfortunately, Tiger is only supported on native G3s that became unsupported since Jaguar. So the original iMac, beige G3, and non-FireWire PowerBook G3. To even run Panther with XPostFacto, you need a G3 or G4 upgrade card to run on anything that didn't come natively with a G3. At this point, only Jaguar (10.2) and lower are supported on non-G3s. (I have run Panther on a 7500 with a G3 upgrade car via XPF, though.)

And you do need a 9.x boot disk to run XPF, but once you have OS X installed, you would only need 9.x on the system if you want to load the Classic environment. So if you had two CD-ROM drives, you could boot from one running OS 9, then put your OS X install CD in the other, to install. (I did this to load it on the 7500 with the internal CD-ROM and an external SCSI CD-RW drive.)

EDIT2 using the control panel, can i share the whole computer? or just one file?

You can go File -> 'Sharing' for the whole hard drive, and share it; but it's something you do in the Finder, not in the control panel.