What have you done with a PowerPC today?

[Amethyst1]

Nokia 7650 for me in 2002 - at that point such tech wasn't cool to most people but just plain weird!

The 7650 wasn't exactly a mainstream phone though A guy at school had it back in the day. I was more interested in the fact it ran Symbian OS than the camera. The CommuniCam for the T68 (probably) predated the 7650 but I never saw that one in the wild back then. And it wasn't exactly built-in, more clip-on...

 

[MarkC426]

Wow, I think I had a T68.
I didn't know there WAS a camera ad-on.......

 

[Dronecatcher]

The CommuniCam for e.g. the SE T68 (probably) predated the 7650 but I never saw that one in the wild back then. And it wasn't exactly built-in, more "clip-on"...

Ha ha - I bought one of those for my partner as she was jealous of my 7650

 

[Amethyst1]

Wow, I think I had a T68.
I didn't know there WAS a camera ad-on.......

There’s even a version of the camera for the T39 despite it only having a tiny greyscale screen.

Ha ha - I bought one of those for my partner as she was jealous of my 7650

Man, those “superphones” sure made my poor 8210 look dated…

 

[Dronecatcher]

Man, those “superphones” sure made my poor 8210 look dated…

My director had one of those, I remember her hurling it across the office in a fit of rage after a converstion didn't go her way....naturally, it was undamaged

 

[Amethyst1]

My director had one of those, I remember her hurling it across the office in a fit of rage […]

I did that with my SLVR once to stop it from acting up. It actually worked but the phone was still a waste of money.

 

[eyoungren]

My 7650 peak output was VGA....but until I bought a Bluetooth dongle (which my daughter rightly pointed out was "blue but it's not a tooth") could only get photos off the phone by emailing them to myself!

I had three methods (pre-Dropbox)…

Email. I was with Sprint then, so consequently due to their servers what you got emailed was low resolution. Completely dumb considering the phone camera resolution was low anyway!.

Sprint's photo website system. Still low resolution.

BitPim. BitPim marked my first attempts to start working around Apple and my carrier's limitations. I could get full res photos from my Katana but I had a finicky connector and it didn't always work well. But Sprint provided no other way to directly get your photos off your phone. To this day, I still have the app in my Applications folder.

 

[netsrot39]

Well, apparently I used 5 ram disks of 2GB each.

Anyway: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/favorite-software-setup.2308073/?post=30192445#post-30192445

Just follow the directions. The script in there will automate the RAIDing, but I never figured out a way to automate the creation of the RAM disks. There is probably a way to do that but I didn't search very hard because I don't often reboot - which would make me want to figure it out.

Back in June I asked about RAM disks larger than 2 GB. OS X versions prior to Snow Leopard do unfortunately have some limit in place so the post of eyoungren inspired me to try to create multiple ones and merging them afterwards. I've also wanted something that can be automated.

I wrote a little script (or rather copy and pasted something together) that will just do that:

do shell script "diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'r1' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://3663872`"

do shell script "diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'r2' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://3663872`"

do shell script "diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'r3' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://3663872`"

do shell script "diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'r4' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://3663872`"

do shell script "diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'r5' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://3663872`"

do shell script "diskutil createRAID concat 'RamDisk' HFS+ /Volumes/r1 /Volumes/r2 /Volumes/r3 /Volumes/r4 /Volumes/r5" user name "USER" password "PW" with administrator privileges

This will create a RAM disk that has approximately 8GB in size. Below you'll find a speed test of said merged RAM Disk:

If one wants to automate the process just paste the code into Script Editor and create an .app file. Next, just go to System Preferences and add the .app file to your startup items.

Since I have 16GB of RAM installed in my G5, I think an 8 GB RAM Disk is very appropriate. My G5 hardly ever uses more than 4GB of RAM with regular use and I want to make use of most of the available memory. Use cases of RAM disks are many but for me it is primarily having a really fast drive and also having a drive for files I do not need anymore after my session (avoid clutter in the first place).

 

[eyoungren]

Back in June I asked about RAM disks larger than 2 GB. OS X versions prior to Snow Leopard do unfortunately have some limit in place so the post of eyoungren inspired me to try to create multiple ones and merging them afterwards. I've also wanted something that can be automated.

I wrote a little script (or rather copy and pasted something together) that will just do that:

do shell script "diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'r1' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://3663872`"

do shell script "diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'r2' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://3663872`"

do shell script "diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'r3' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://3663872`"

do shell script "diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'r4' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://3663872`"

do shell script "diskutil erasevolume HFS+ 'r5' `hdiutil attach -nomount ram://3663872`"

do shell script "diskutil createRAID concat 'RamDisk' HFS+ /Volumes/r1 /Volumes/r2 /Volumes/r3 /Volumes/r4 /Volumes/r5" user name "USER" password "PW" with administrator privileges

This will create a RAM disk that has approximately 8GB in size. Below you'll find a speed test of said merged RAM Disk:

View attachment 2027134
If one wants to automate the process just paste the code into Script Editor and create an .app file. Next, just go to System Preferences and add the .app file to your startup items.

Since I have 16GB of RAM installed in my G5, I think an 8 GB RAM Disk is very appropriate. My G5 hardly ever uses more than 4GB of RAM with regular use and I want to make use of most of the available memory. Use cases of RAM disks are many but for me it is primarily having a really fast drive and also having a drive for files I do not need anymore after my session (avoid clutter in the first place).

Nice!

At some point I will get my Quad back up and add this to the mix. I was using a RAM disk for much the same reason as you. But I also moved the T4Fx app and my profile/cache into the RAM disk. An up to date copy of that stuff was kept on my HD and reloaded each time I rebooted and mounted the RAM disk.

 

[Amethyst1]

At some point I will get my Quad back up and add this to the mix.

Ain't your poor electricity bill high enough yet?

(Just kidding. I know where you're coming from.)

 

[eyoungren]

Ain't your poor electricity bill high enough yet?

(Just kidding. I know where you're coming from.)

I need to finish organizing the garage…

Which means organizing all the tech stuff, bits, parts, screws, junk, etc that's out there…

Then, I need to decide where the damn thing is going, then run cords so I can hook up a power strip…

Then replace the 20" ACD with something else so the 20" ACD can get hooked back up to the Quad. Then find two new hard drives for the Quad, because both those drives ended up in the MacPro.

Then clone the last save back…

See…easy. I'll get back to you on it in a few years.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Now that it’s de rigueur to rename an operating system you’ve optimised, if anyone asks what I’m running on my Powerbook, from now on the answer is Black Triangle

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

Black Triangle

Why I'm getting impression it is something linked to X-Files?

 

[Dronecatcher]

Why I'm getting impression it is something linked to X-Files?

The truth is out there

 

[Dronecatcher]

Why I'm getting impression it is something linked to X-Files?

 

[Amethyst1]

The truth is out there

Trust no one!

 

[eyoungren]

Checked the G4 NAS today. Hmmmm…almost a year of uptime. 👍

 

[pochopsp]

Checked the G4 NAS today. Hmmmm…almost a year of uptime. 👍

[image]

Hi @eyoungren ! Could you please explain me what a NAS is and how do you use your G4 as a NAS?
I am totally ignorant with that.

 

[eyoungren]

Hi @eyoungren ! Could you please explain me what a NAS is and how do you use your G4 as a NAS?
I am totally ignorant with that.

NAS is short for Network Attached Storage. These are boxes that you can fill with hard drives (or SSDs) and plug an ethernet cable into. The firmware they come with is designed to share those drives on a network. Apple's concept of a NAS is the old Apple Time Capsules.

You can access the NAS interface by using a web browser to go to it's IP address. Once logged in you can format drives, create a RAID, decide how the drive will be shared on the network, etc.

In the context of my G4 I simply have the G4 booted into my account. I used file sharing inside System Preferences to share the two internal hard drives to my home network. That's all the G4 is doing - file sharing those two drives. So, I refer to it as my G4 NAS because it's doing the exact same function as you'd find a real NAS doing, only it's an actual computer. It's a 'glorified' NAS if you will because its an actual real computer doing the sharing - something NAS boxes are not.

My G4 has two 3TB hard drives for a total of 6TBs shared to the network.

But, in addition to the G4 sharing its drives, I also have a real NAS - attached via ethernet cable to my network just as I explained above.






Above is the homepage for my real NAS.

This box also has two 3TB hard drives. But I have them set as a RAID-0 which means the drives capacities are combined and the entire thing is presented to the network as a single 6TB drive. I just call this my NAS, because that's what it is.

That is why I say G4 NAS, or my NAS - because one is just shared drives from a G4 and the other is an actual NAS.

 

[pochopsp]

@eyoungren wow, thanks for your detailed answer. It was very kind from you.
I do have another question: can you access your drives from external networks or only from your home network?

 

[eyoungren]

@eyoungren wow, thanks for your detailed answer. It was very kind from you.
I do have another question: can you access your drives from external networks or only from your home network?

In both cases of the word 'you' the answer is yes. In general you can, and specifically for me, yes I can.

But external access is a function of your router and your ISP (Internet Service Provider). If we want to give ourselves external access we need to open up specific ports in our router. We then have to tell the router that any traffic coming through that port should be directed to the IP address of the computer or NAS that we want to share from. This is called port forwarding. It's important then to give the internal devices static IP addresses so that the traffic goes to the right device.

But, here's where your ISP comes in. Windows PCs are the dominant computer/OS type around the world. PCs use SAMBA (SMB) to fileshare on internal networks. SMB has some inherent security problems and when you open a port in your router you are creating a security risk. That's because routers aren't smart enough to know who is or is not a bad actor trying to access your device through the port you opened. Once they have access they can do a lot of things that violate the agreement of fair use you have with your ISP.

So, ISPs block SMB over the internet. You can open the port(s) on your router but your ISP has those ports blocked usually by default. Thus there is no way to fileshare Windows/PCs over the net using the stock filesharing protocol (SMB) that they use.

But Apple has AFP (Apple File Protocol) as well. My ISP does not block AFP ports. So, I have them open and they redirect to my server (a G3 B&W). I also have the ports that iTunes and the Server management software uses open as well. I simply need to use my external IP address to access my server from outside. Port forwarding is one device per port, so I have to choose which device on my network. I chose the server and not my NAS or my G4. I could choose those, I'd just have to change the address.

Here is my router's port forwarding page with my open ports.



The ones named iStat are so my iPhones can access iStat info from the internal computers that have those IP addresses. Doom is a port my son needed open for gaming and AirMessage allows my Pixel 3aXL to use an iMessage like app to connect with one of my Macs that shares iMessage to the app on the Pixel. Without that, I couldn't get iMessage on my Pixel outside of my home network.

 

[Tratkazir_the_1st]

@eyoungren
External access - VPN only, but you'll need public ("white") IPv4 address & for more convinient usage - some DDNS service. Port forwarding is Evil in its purest form .

 

[mikas]

Checked the G4 NAS today. Hmmmm…almost a year of uptime. 👍

View attachment 2028406

Just spying your screengrab and wondering..
What is your monitor resolution with that G4? Or are you doing vnc / screensharing or some other means to it? There seems to be binoculars in the menu bar, was that remote management icon.

 

[pochopsp]

In both cases of the word 'you' the answer is yes. In general you can, and specifically for me, yes I can.

But external access is a function of your router and your ISP (Internet Service Provider). If we want to give ourselves external access we need to open up specific ports in our router. We then have to tell the router that any traffic coming through that port should be directed to the IP address of the computer or NAS that we want to share from. This is called port forwarding. It's important then to give the internal devices static IP addresses so that the traffic goes to the right device.

[ ... ]

Thanks again. So if I got it, you use your NAS and your G4 inside your home network, and the G3 server from outside. Is it right?

 

[Amethyst1]

What is your monitor resolution with that G4?

Going by that screenshot it's 1280×1024.