I Bought the Last One Apple Ever Made... - Apple XServe 3,1 Server

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Apple used to make servers. For real. What were was the XServe like? What could it do? Why has the Mac Server gone the way of the iPod Touch?
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CHAPTERS
---------------------------------------------------
0:00 Intro
1:46 Is this their last server?
2:32 Tour of the machine
4:45 Opening it up
7:09 Is this a GPU?
7:54 Reminds me of the Mac Pro 2019
8:25 Who used these?
9:44 Getting it to work was CRAZY
12:40 Using it
16:35 Why they're gone
17:30 We tried to game on it

[@TigerofRobare]

Honestly, a video taking older devices to the Apple store to see how far back you can go and still get support from them might be really cool.

[@Klokopf52]

They refuse to fix my sisters i phone 7 because its "too old", so not very far it would seem.

[@SpartanDara]

It's something like 6 or 7 year, Apple has "official" terminology like "vintage" and "obsolete". They pretty much won't do anything for you after that point, so it wouldn't make a very interesting video unfortunately

[@aaatechrescue]

They wont touch it, it'll fall under the VINTAGE or OBSOLETE category

[@p0k3mn1]

@@Klokopf52 the iPhone 7 is 5 years old for a phone that’s pretty old now

[@michaelandrews4783]

@@p0k3mn1 Not really google and other smart phone companies now guarantee security updates for at least 5 years...... Phones and laptops easily last over 5 years these days with a simple battery replacement.

[@r0bfleming]

As the only "Mac" guy in IT at a local paper I was given a couple these to look after (G3's running 10.3). It was an absolute breeze. They never gave me any problems, and one of them held the record for the longest continually running server in the company, it went for over 4 years without a reboot.

[@filuka100]

damn

[@SnackyPaper]

That’s crazy for a g3 too. such a simple time back then. Much less to go wrong

[@quantum5661]

i got a G4 sitting in my closet. modern pc's are pretty good, but old apple case design is the GOAT.

[@pseudotasuki]

IIRC the first generation were G4s.

[@r0bfleming]

@@pseudotasuki You're right. After all these years, I still can't type!! 🤣🤣

[@ElderWrath]

I actually set one of these up in 2011 within an institution ~15 users. It was easy to setup with no server knowledge at all, and ran painlessly for years. It was honestly a great product (the server suite).

[@ElderWrath]

Oh and 100% a followup is required, see if you can get the server software working in a group too, its quite cool

[@abinaslimbu3057]

WW1 computing communion

[@ohitshammy]

My high school used an XServe to run the print server for the whole school. This didn’t get changed until the school moved everything to the cloud and switched to an old mac mini in my final year (2021) when it was then used in digital technologies studies. It was honestly a cool piece to play with.

[@Teluric2]

How " demanding"😅

[@collin5353]

The drive connectors aren’t actually proprietary! They’re a weird 40 pin SCA-2 connector that implemented some whacky version of SCSI. The protocol running through the connector however is likely proprietary as the chip on the board within the drive caddy is a SATA failover multiplexer, and the backplane within the Xserve uses a SATA-PCIE bridge chip. I’ve spent a good deal of time trying to reverse engineer their system only to say “to hell with it” and design my own backplane and caddy adapter boards.

[@Jestokost]

So… it’s a proprietary implementation of a weird, rare connector from the 80s/90s. For all intents and purposes, that’s proprietary.

[@ghosthunter0950]

sounds like you were working on a cool project. can you explain what it was?

[@Ornithopter470]

First time I've seen scsi mentioned on a video talking about hardware manufactured this century.

[@chrisbaker8533]

@@Ornithopter470 It's mentioned every time someone talks about SAS drives. SAS-Serial Attached SCSI.

[@KayJay01]

@@Ornithopter470 Uh... SAS is SCSI, so like most enterprise hardware talk does mention SCSI.

[@CrkdLtrN]

I worked with one of these at a school. Was very impressed by the user and computer policies you could set. Much easier than Windows Server. The fun part was using Apple Remote Desktop and setting up all the computers in a room to reboot at the same time. You'd get about 30 or more bootup dongs at the same time. That was fun.

[@Alex-zi1nb]

bootup dongs, heh

[@crazycoffee]

My public school district had Apple servers. The school network overall wasnt setup properly or very securely. I got suspended for taking control of my teachers computer (through a software you could lock, share screen, take control, broadcast certan screens, etcetra.) as he was trying to share how to download files off of solidworks server.

[@MoixDeCarrer]

This is exactly the kind of software quality I miss from Apple since they decided to kill all the "advanced" features of Os X. I remember I was able to create in seconds an ethernet to Wifi bridge in few clicks from my PowerBook G4. I remember they had a quite good WiFi and ethernet analysis tool built into the system, maybe it's something to do a review about.

[@ItsMerle.]

its a double edged sword, extra features are nice, but if nobody uses them and they could be easily installed as an application, they just bloat the software and increase the base load, and decrease the maximum performance. Its the same reason why they don't support 32bit software anymore, even though all of their older machines technically support it. Windows has a huge Problem because they keep all their old routines and programs, they just add new stuff which each update, which is why users have to go to questionable sources to get OSs like tiny windows, which are not entirely independently verifiable to be safe, but its still better because they don't want to use 20% of their CPU power on idle.

[@einarabelc5]

Once Steve was gone, there was no real Apple. With him left the people and the incentive for that kind of attention to detail. Companies are mostly NOT like that anymore not even remotely. It's all about Crony capitalism now. With that said, the Smartphones are the worst thing to happen to mankind since gun powder. The internet was never the same after those and it became something else.

[@volkhen0]

Now it’s dumbed down consumer company.

[@cooked.gaming]

@@ItsMerle. hence, the rise of linux hahaha Microsofts anti-consumerism will see them abandoned in a couple decades

[@nuduakj]

But nothings changed in that regard? All that is still part of the latest MacOS. I can easily create wifi bridges and ethernet bridges, or analyze the network trough built in logging and diagnostic tools. Just hold down the option key when clicking the wifi-icon and you'll get all these options, as well as detailed network information and live updated signal-information and radio-details.

[@soupisgoodfood42]

They originally had 4 drive bays up front. But then they needed more cooling, hence the two air intakes that are exactly half the size of a drive bay. Also, you won't see many rack server chassis made from stainless steel.

[@eirinym]

Definitely would be great to see a follow-up. Whatever wacky things you can do to abandoned hardware is always fun.

[@RDM606]

agreed

[@0q2628]

linux

[@cliffzimmermann2985]

Yes, please.

[@FintanMoloney]

Absolutely - looking forward to seeing what the guys can get going on this piece of kit :D

[@EdwinDoubledice]

Yes, a follow up would be very nice!

[@cheeseisgreat24]

Man, I really miss the Xserve and the old server software. It was a breeze for me to support back in the day, and was one of those moments where Apple was truly at their best, even with some of the proprietary hardware junk they put in it. Today’s Apple isn’t nearly as bad as many people complain that they are, but they are also not nearly as good as they used to be.

[@Dawilsi]

That last sentence is such a great quote!

[@DanielBaldwinSax]

​@@Dawilsi mmm😊

[@T0TALLYAWESOMEGUY]

Yeah I've never seen xserve until now. A seriously good server package, very impressed

[@hooptiej]

as an Xserve and Xserve RAID SAN-Admin back in the day.. yes... and no. you never had the metadata network controller die on an Xsan in a multi-petabyte fabric..if i never touch Xserve raid/fiberchannelSAN again it'll be too soon.

[@TheAlfajuls]

This was the only server that i hade to use, and was a really good and easy software and hardware plataform. We use it mostly for fila server on a Apple Service Provider to instal Mac OS X on any Mac that came to the store.

[@oliver-mandic]

Got one of those screaming beside me right now. Maxed out at 32GB RAM, added a GT1030 because why not and a USB3 PCI card. The last really usable OS X Server version was High Sierra and the highest capacity hard drives you could use internally were 2GB drives. Got three of those. I‘m a little confused by why you ran into problems installing the OS, though. A USB stick with a High SIerra installer isn’t that hard to create (if you still have access ANY Intel-based Mac) and there‘s plenty of those ready to download and flash all over the web.

[@t3chninja_official]

Yes the USB installer is key! I actually have all the multi-CD installers and DVD installers for OSX Server in my office in a neat little CD/DVD storage caddy with all the activation keys! Some are still sealed! I used DeployStudio to make server images and made redoing server so easy. Spin-up DeployStudio over the network with NetBoot, wipe and image in 30 minutes to have a working server with all the software ready to go. Made imaging iMac labs and user MacBooks a breeze! I miss those days. Now it's JAMF and so complicated.

[@TheTechwizGuy]

💯💯💯💯

[@BrianMWPG]

The PowerPC G4/G5 versions were huge in DNA sequencing in the early 2000's as well (PowerPC had particular instructions that reduced the number of steps per cycle drastically improving performance compared with other processors) - was likely a fair percentage of the Xserve sales from what I was told back then, with the move to Intel in 2006/2007, that advantage went away.

[@TimCutts]

Yep - my friends at The BioTeam sold a bioinformatics software stack that ran on top of XGrid clusters. The combo gave a very powerful setup for small labs lacking the usual level of expertise needed to build a small HPC service. Remember this is a time before Linux clusters were as wildly popular as they are now, and building UNIX clusters normally needed some serious know-how.

[@Stopinvadingmyhardware]

PowerPC is still available

[@BrianMWPG]

well, in general PowerPC is still available, but Apple moved away from it in 2006.

[@markboyle9941]

Back in the early noughties I put together a computer cluster consisting of Xserve G5's for molecular dynamics simulations. They were dual 2.3's running Yellow Dog Linux with MPICH for clustering. You could get some real performance out of these CPU's by taking advantage of the Altivec SIMD extensions on the CPU, although performance was considerably better when I compiled stuff using IBM XLF/XLC as compared to the GCC and binutils that came with Yellow Dog. I also had a top end G5 desktop (one of the Quad G5's at the time). That was the last Mac I ever bought, I couldn't see the point after the Intel switch as I could get superior performing hardware for a fraction of the price.

[@00SEVEN28]

Maybe in time the M1 chip line will bring this back?

[@zacharysherf9397]

I spent a ton of time with these in the field and was fortunate enough to own several 08' models and one 09 model. They were incredible machines, but also surprisingly versatile. Believe it or not you can run VMWare ESXi 5.5 on these. At one point my homelab was quite the setup, consisting of apple OEM fibre channel HBAs, Apple OEM fibre channel CABLES(White and all), and 2 xserve targeted Promise Vtrak 5000 raid arrays, which were configured as a SAN. People forget macOS Server was legit, but it really was the only way to go when you were managing Macs in business. When I moved I literally left them because the whole setup was several hundred pounds and in our basement.

[@cdvallee]

I work for VMware, and back when I was in support (2011-2016) Apple was a fairly frequent customer of mine, and we had a separate ESXi fork specific to the X-Serve platform. They had some fairly large datacenters running on this. Don't think I ever ran into any other customers that were running it, and come to think of it, I don't know if that fork was ever fully GA. It was, however, the reason you can select Mac OSX as a VM guest type, which confused a lot of customers and made them think they could effectively circumvent Apple's EULA which specifies that OSX can only run on Apple hardware.

[@kenneyc]

It's been a long time since I did any work with an Xserve, but if memory serves (and I may get some of this wrong): The drive bay connectors weren't proprietary, just uncommon. The mini HDD inside used the same connector as the iPods at the time (on the drive side). The original PPC Xserve's drive firmware was custom to facilitate hot swapping and some monitoring features (you could put in a 3rd party drive, and it would read, but you wouldn't want to hot swap it)

[@pyrotinker]

Yeah, I run after market HDDs in mine.

[@espenkoht5288]

Indeed. Ran these myself and had no problems running generic SATA drives in the sleds without Apple specific firmware

[@pseudotasuki]

Not even that uncommon for servers. It's a Fibre Channel connector. The internal HDD's connector is what Toshiba used on their 1.8" SATA drives prior to the introduction of Micro SATA. There simply wasn't an actual standard which would work.

[@jeremybarber2837]

Would love a follow up on this one! I spent a fair amount of time with these back in the day, loved working with them compared to DELLs of the same era.

[@lucasrem]

did you ever made it ? why cry here, if you fail to do it ? Why you needed it ?

[@AidanfromEdmonton]

Hats off to the writer Tanner and especially the editor Mark for making the super convoluted OS explanation something I actually enjoyed watching!

[@phych]

We had one of these serving our library building. It was our Open Directory server and I freakin loved it as well as OS X Server. The UI for OS X Server was really intuitive and allowed a level of complexity that needed workarounds and third party stuff for our Active Directory environment. It's a damn shame Apple abandoned it, though it kinda makes sense given the MDM world we're in now. And you're damn right I wanna see a follow up.

[@_____alyptic]

MDM World?

[@al45tair]

The firmware thing is actually about testing (you would be shocked at how often HDD manufacturers have managed to ship broken disk firmware), not about locking things down. You absolutely can replace the drives with off the shelf units.

[@patriksonestad8208]

Absolutely, I've done that many times. I've even replaced the PATA drives in the Xserve RAID with SATA drives with a converter!

[@stevedixon921]

My admittedly limited experience in the matter differs. Last time I had to change a hard drive out in an Apple PC we had to pay the Apple tax for an Apple firmware approved drive. The generic off the shelf drives refused to be accepted by the machine as a valid storage device and outright refused to function otherwise. I suspect this specific issue comes and goes as they release iterations. Apple is not the only one that pulls this crap, I had to deal with a non Apple server once (forget the brand now, might have been HP or IBM) that would halt during boot to warn that an 'uncertified' drive was installed and I had to press the any key to continue...for each and every boot. Compaq (eventually bought by HP) had PATA hard drive connectors where they switched a few pins around to make generic drives not work at all (+300% premium for Compaq compatible drives). This specific practice seems to have gone away after SATA arrived, maybe the SATA group put some 'do not touch' wording in their spec sheet. Dell for a while switched some pins on the motherboard connector to make generic power supplies incompatible as well. Though Dell seems to have stopped that practice after consumers got a bit noisy about it.

[@mwiz100]

@@stevedixon921 I've been swapping drives in macs for decades (back to PATA era) with generic versions, never been an issue as long as you don't use some super cheap drives that don't fully/properly support a given protocol.

[@elviorion]

can confirm

[@sheriffofhuddersfield]

Ive used WD 1TB in this server

[@wilsonmeredith5517]

This brought me waaaaaay back. Binding AD to an XServer was a pain but once you got it going it was very efficient and authenticated both Mac and PC users for resources on a Windows Domain. Good to hear there is a community keeping it alive.

[@ocelliotts]

Oh my god…favorite video Linus has done. The process to get the OS on there was hysterical to listen to and painful to remember when I’ve had similar issues resurrecting old macs. Can’t wait to see them convert to a gaming machine.

[@thejpkotor]

It isn’t actually that hard, there’s several easy guides online that show how to make bootable isos for USB sticks. It’s as easy as downloading one of the macOS installers, and then running a few terminal commands.

[@ocelliotts]

@@thejpkotor oh I know it’s not hard, and I know about how easy it is to get OS installers. The funny thing is when it doesn’t work and you have to go back like 5 OS’s and then install them one at a time because going to the latest it supports won’t work properly and finish the install. I restored dozens of old machines but sometimes something in them is just stubborn and the only way to do it is to install in a ridiculous series of steps. That’s what I found hysterical about this.

[@Dcarp7]

A follow-up would be extremely nice. Never even knew these things even existed. Especially when they come from a great era for Apple in general. Now I am curious to see what you guys can do with it and turn it into a gaming rig. That will be a fun video.

[@MStrong95]

Linus, I think it would make an interesting video series to how far you can go with modernizing and perhaps even doing some sort of daily driver challenge with Windows Server vs Mac OS Server.

[@arkangel7330]

The old macOS Server email server was just postfix. The macOS Server app basically was a wrapper around postfix, spam assassin, apache, etc. so you could create accounts on a GUI. you could still edit the necessary config files from the command line.

[@thejpkotor]

The hard drives are not locked. They use what is now an ‘older’ SATA spec and you may have to fiddle with jumpers on newer drives to set them to SATA 2 speeds

[@nambrosch]

Would love to see how capable this hardware still is today.

[@Slurkz]

Luke Miani did a douple of pretty nice video’s on this, a while ago.

[@microcolonel]

Not very. It's ordinary Intel hardware from when it was produced.

[@Pendleton115]

@@microcolonel It actually holds up pretty well, Intel Xeons still perform pretty well for most tasks. Of course the GPU is the biggest weak point. But that can theoretically be upgraded to something like an RX 580 with a PCIE riser cable.

[@nambrosch]

@@microcolonel I have a mac pro 5,1 and it's far from ordinary intel hardware.

[@sas408]

@@Pendleton115 you forgot to mention its generation

[@Gobeman]

Interesting showcase of how Apple makes servers i'd dare say. Allways neat to see the tech that's not in the commonplace of what people hear or see

[@ChristopherHailey]

But they make it weird just to ensure planned obsolescence not for technological advantages.

[@pseudotasuki]

@@ChristopherHailey It isn't actually that weird. Linus misidentified at least two standard interfaces as proprietary.

[@djwilduk]

We had a stack of these at BBC London (local news) from 2009-2013 to run the video ingest and playout. There was a nice custom control system (MAM) by Sienna. Very nice indeed. And they looked great in the rack! Although rather a lot of crappy converters hanging out of the back (e.g. mini DP to VGA).

[@t1merickson]

This was such a nostalgia trip for me. My first job was as an IT admin assistant working with these in a school to manage a fleet of Mac laptops and desktops

[@joshuabrazile]

I deployed so many of these back in the day. OS X Server was a good platform, but Apple started chopping away at it and eventually made it useless. I worked with a number of clients that were using XSAN and it was a far more elegant SAN solution at the compared to other options at the same price point.

[@Ifixstuf]

os x server was amazing to use in a time so many used NT. It's really a shame they killed it

[@pseudotasuki]

The Intel transition was probably its death knell. No performance per watt advantage negated its advantage in supercomputing clusters, which was keeping the product line alive. Perhaps we'll see a return of the XServe now that they have that advantage again.

[@GrizzLeeAdams]

While the sleds are custom, the connector is actually pretty standard FibreChannel, and I've had limited success running other drives on the interposers in the sleds. The problem is the classic early Apple SATA chipsets not properly supporting SATA-2, so when the drive reports "Hey, I can do more than 150Mb/s!" things fall apart. WD had a jumper setting on some of their early SATA-2 drives that would cause them to only report SATA-1 support and work with these older systems. Even then I never saw them as reliable. The EFI implementation on these machines is another disaster, as from what I recall it is EFI32, and not EFI64 or UEFI. Getting other things to run beyond macOS 10.6 was an absolute pain, and eventually I migrated the NAS we were using to a VM on a Dell R910 host system. Oh the joys of having two dozen fibrechannel harddrives and migrating all the data off to an external usb drive, then back on after rebuilding the array as a ZFS storage pool.

[@vltek]

Good to know I was not the only one that kept saying "not proprietary" every time he said that. Anyone that has worked in SANs for a length of time recognizes a FC connector, but also that 9 times out of 10 its just a sata to fc adapter. The firmware being locked is also super common in both FC and iSCSI environments. I know the video is for entertainment but it always irks me when he just makes up stuff on enterprise hardware.

[@logan_kes]

@@vltek came here to say just that 😂 usually LTT is pretty good, but with enterprise stuff, especially Jake is usually kinda off

[@tehfalcon]

2009 xserves are EFI64

[@whette_fahrtz]

@@tehfalcon Yup, that's precisely why they could go to El Capitan. EFI32 supported ended at version 10.7.5 I believe.

[@slimz.]

I got monterey running with opencore and a random 1tb drive. I didn't have any luck creating the usb with windows so i had to create it from a mac vm...

[@auswaz4323]

This brings back memories! We had 3 of these and an x raid running qt broadcaster for live and on demand streaming back in 2007. Had a fleet of Mac minis running broadcaster talking back to the servers. Was amazing technology at the time!

[@thelanecampbell]

I ran an MSP in those days. I helped install MacOS X servers into businesses. Drove me crazy that Apple didn’t push these harder. I hated Windows SBS and loved working with these. 🎉

[@Madobe-Nanami]

12:00 Correction, Lion Server was a direct upgrade from snow leopard server and let you keep your old server apps at the time. Without the lion server upgrade app anymore, you'll probably be unable to do it though. I love my xServe! Very lovely even today for home use. It wasn't super unpopular though, as many school organizations and the such took use of them. Its death and the death of true OS X server always took me aback.

[@sLudwig]

the school i went to actually had an xserve as well. got to take it home after they upgraded which was nice

[@EwanMarshall]

I used to administrate the one at the school I went to, had the xserve RAID with one for storage of user files.

[@Madobe-Nanami]

@@sLudwig Oo nice grab.

[@Madobe-Nanami]

@@EwanMarshall I wish we had gotten a true sata Xserve Raid before apple pulled the plug. Id love to use it (as the 3,1 having it in the end made it a pass.)

[@pseudotasuki]

They're also a bit quieter than the average 1U server, but that's not saying much. Still extremely loud.

[@espenkoht5288]

Two corrections: 1) the HD firmware was not a “lock in” we upgrade capacity with off the self drives with no issues 2) Remote Desktop was plain VNC for basic screen sharing

[@HaydnCockayne]

Yep 100% this, I upgraded many Xserves with off-the-shelf SATA drives

[@datachu]

You have no idea how long I have been waiting for LTT to make this exact vid. I've wanted one of these XServe systems since I was a kid.

[@MathersHale]

These were pretty massive in education back when apple implemented their learn grants (~2009). Basically had to have one if you wanted to mend Active Directory into the Mac ecosystem. I worked with a local school district during college that had 4 of them and the Raid system running in a server room. Honestly, they were great!! The imaging system is dearly missed as there is no way to image over the wire anymore. Those things were still in production and still hosting the file servers last I talked to the school.

[@baybae92]

Mac OS X Server used to kick ass. We had one of these in a rack with an XServe RAID for my video productions class in high school. I miss the XServe days 😭

[@baybae92]

@@spacecadet2172 I definitely won the location lottery by growing up in the Wine Country, for which I feel incredibly grateful. We were lower middle class, but there were hellllllllllla rich people in my town, so the one public high school was pretty nice. Video Prod wasn’t district funded, but funded by generous local donors :)

[@dtemp132]

I bought an Xserve Xeon for my student newspaper. It was great for someone less skilled at Linux system administration. I'm pretty sure I remember putting whatever HDD I wanted into the sleds and it working, but I could be wrong.

[@sparroestar22]

I also don't recall having issues with 3rd party hard drives on these... actually my first time hearing of a "Firmware Lock". I knew Apple HDDs had their own firmwares, however.

[@liaminwales]

I looked online and people seem to be putting random HDD's and SSD's in.

[@jadamsnz]

My work had a couple of these for image deployments on multiple campuses (later replaced by multiple Mac Minis) and we replaced hard drives with 3rd party ones no problem.

[@gothnate]

I may have misunderstood what he said, but I thought he meant the sleds were required since the connectors were proprietary. Not that the HDDs were proprietary, you just couldn't use them without the sleds. That seems like Apple's SoP, where they use off the shelf hardware, but use proprietary connectors and controllers so you have to pay for the expensive stuff to get the hardware to work.

[@ChristopherHailey]

@@gothnate No, the drives are locked and you just can't use any drive, which is why Apple is crap.

[@whistl034]

I love it. YES I want to see the follow-up, please. Thanks for going the extra mile in researching less popular Mac technology. I admin'd a couple Xserves in our old DC, they were great. Nsync and nxs were their hostnames, because why not.

[@TerruvianPuff]

FINALLY! IVE BEEN WAITING FOR A VIDEO ON THE XSERVE!

[@DrAnimePhD]

God I miss Xserve. I wish they could bring it back, especially now that the demand for ARM server blades has skyrocketed thanks to the Fugaku. If they could take clusters of M1 Ultras and put them into server blades that would be amazing

[@RealJoseph123]

I also wish Apple would also bring back the Wi-Fi routers that they use to have.

[@DrAnimePhD]

@@RealJoseph123 Maybe one day since they’re working on their own custom 5G modems so they don’t have to rely on Qualcomm for them in the iPhone

[@o_o-_-8639]

@@RealJoseph123 yh also the wireless tome machine was nice and the Airport had even a headphone jack for speakers if you wanted to Airplay some music

[@drboom2]

The internal drive isn't proprietary. Just a standard 1.8" ZIF drive. Used in iPods, Zunes, the original MacBook Air, and plenty of other devices that needed more compact drives.

[@RandomKSandom]

This is a side of the server world that I knew existed, but never got to see, let alone use. Thank you very much for sharing.

[@zakseipel9494]

I was a Jamf admin at a small company for about half a decade. We had a bunch of these running and a 100% Mac environment. Linus’s rant about making bootable drives basically described my job in a nutshell. I had bootable disks, hard drives, and USBS in an actual vault safe for fear of someone breaking them. I am talking about 10-20 of each that I needed of all media types.

[@HoloScope]

Yes this, need em in FireWire, USB, DVD, and CD lol

[@theonewhodiditfirst802]

You could have used the terminal to simply set the current date back to the time the certificate was valid and install the OS from DVD or USB.

[@TheTechwizGuy]

💯😂💯

[@Gatorade69]

@@TheTechwizGuy Sorry but I can't take anyone who calls themselves a Tech Wiz seriously when they only reply in emojis, especially the 100 and Crying laughing ones.

[@ZachariasEnislidis]

I concur, i found it the hard way spending weeks thinking ways to overcome this shitty situation when working with a mac book pro 2011.

[@marc974]

@@Gatorade69 good, because nobody asked you

[@bmp2421]

@@marc974 me after replying with the most clever comback (i am very cool)

[@Nabeelco]

As an ex-Apple Employee, I can shed some light on why the XServe is the way it is: This was a Steve Jobs era product. The reason it's such a mess now, and was killed off was because of Tim Cook. Tim Cook wants Apple to be a premium consumer brand, Steve Jobs wanted Apple to be an accessible, user friendly, high performance-high quality technology brand. With Steve Jobs' death, the direction of the company changed.

[@TalesOfWar]

The direction of the entire industry has changed in the 12 years since Steve's passing. The main point of these things was because nobody else was supporting the Mac in the "back office", so Apple did it themselves. As they became more popular, other companies started to support them and they got to the point where those products were good enough that Apple no longer really needed to do it. JAMF being the prime example with their Casper tools. More and more services were also moving to cloud based solutions with things like Amazon Web Services and Azure where you could just rent someone else's hardware as and when you need it. We moved to Microsoft hosted Exchange servers years ago after rolling our own local hardware since the beginning of time. It's more reliable, cheaper and if something goes wrong Microsoft have far more resources to fix it than we do. If our server died, the back up was a much older, less capable machine. If it fails in Microsofts datacenter it seamlessly runs from a real time backup from another box.

[@Nabeelco]

@@spacecadet2172 It was actually discontinued shortly before his death. He also was far less involved in the last couple years of his life.

[@sabasman]

F

[@almafuertegmailcom]

Still, this policy of locking down stuff, making proprietary connections and intentionally incompatible crap, and then building in what are essentially root-kits and remote kill-switches into their products in order to have their users by the balls was 100% a Jobs policy. They did it on every product they released, including flagships such as their mp3 player and their phone. This is what they've always done, and continue to do. They're not the only ones, though. And not the only ones doing it in the server space. Many, many years ago I insisted at the company I worked for that we shouldn't get ANY servers from ANY manufacturer, and just build our own. They partially listened to my advice, but eventually pushed some Cobalt crap into us. And only a short few years later Cobalt stopped providing upgrades to their Red Hat based distro, and you couldn't replace the OS on them because the boot loader, kernel and some other crap had to be burned into a ROM soldered into the motherboard, that also had an encryption key, so you couldn't install your own. I ended up having to do a whole crazy setup where we allowed that to boot, and then bootstrapped another more modern distro on top. You shouldn't buy such crap for your own electronics, but that's understandable if you want to. On the server space? Buying something like this is insane.

[@SamMoffatt]

@@Nabeelco Xserve was EOL'd in 2010, not shortly before his death but definitely during a time at which he was less involved. That's the era when they shifted to the Mac Pro and Mac Mini Server style SKU and then slowly paired away the features to the much more limited version until a couple of years back when they completely killed it. I actually think the High Sierra era Server app was still reasonably complete before they removed all of the extra features embedded in it. It's a shame we didn't get to see that.

[@purplecomputing]

Purple Computing user we see 👀 10:27

[@azoriusmage]

Pre KZbin I used to manage a video streaming service and used these and loved them. Wonderful pieces of kit

[@cjsebes]

When I started at a video production company around 2006, my edit room was outfitted with an XServe RAID connected to my Mac G5. In the winter, I didn't need the central heating in my office, as those two machines easily maintained the room at 75ºF/23ºC.

[@notawesomebread]

I've had one of these for awhile now, and it was exciting to see you guys talk about it . They do have a raid battery, and I'd assume most of them are dead by now (mine is, it reminds me every time I start it up). Not only that, the raid card prevents you from booting OS's other than OSX, at least on the main 3 drive bays. You guys should totally turn this thing into something cool, so I can steal your idea and then do it to mine lol

[@whette_fahrtz]

It's likely that whoever they bought this from yanked the battery out a long time ago. OS X would complain if the battery was dead/flat and it's just a ticking time bomb before it turns into a spicy pillow anyways.

[@al45tair]

The raid card is a “MegaRAID”, which is very likely compatible with drivers for similarly branded cards for e.g. Linux. Just FWIW.

[@waycic]

ive been binging LTT and xserve videos recently and this comes out. perfection

[@JR-ky3vp]

Very entertaining video and example on never giving up when faced with a challenge!

[@dyermaker4731]

I would *love* to see a follow up to this. People still use old Mac Pros and Xservers religiously (myself included) and seeing you guys acknowledge that is awesome. Great video!

[@okay7332]

why do you still use them just wondering? im studying computer science at university so this is interesting to me

[@dyermaker4731]

@@okay7332 super easy to upgrade and maintain and relatively cheap to get. I nabbed my 2012 Mac Pro for 165 USD. Cost me about 250 to upgrade the dual CPUs and GPU and I have 64 gbs of ram in there for more intensive work. It’s mighty big but far as I’m concerned there isn’t a better value workstation

[@Teluric2]

Religiously means you ll never admit any issue to worship your sacred company.

[@gpturismo]

Before I was disabled my work had quite a few G4/G5 systems to serve files to our designers. I really liked how Mac OS X integrated easily into any LDAP/ADAP networks. I'm sad Mac OX Server is gone. I miss the mad scientist enthusiast part of apple. When we would go to WWDC we would always meet with engineers and they loved things we did, like we had a frankenstein PowerBook G3 that was built from 4-5 Powerbook G3's with a g4 upgrade. It was easy to intermingle parts and make machines from old hardware back then.

[@johndododoe1411]

I remember fine tuning one at a previous job. They were so good I designed the main rack at the new company to fit the large depth of these beasts. Never got to purchase one, so still rely on a heavily upgraded consumer mac mini.

[@lungshenli]

Honestly Id love to see this thing get actually deployed at LTT or the Lab. or heck, at Linus' home rack. Use the frame for a sick case mod with modern internals. You've got the engineers and A FRICKIN METAL 3D-PRINTER to make it look as close to an actual Apple product as possible. A nice touch would be if whatever beast comes out the end still had FireWire just as an homage.

[@DarkBloodLP]

I always wanted one of them, as a teenager i was so fascinated by the simplicity of it. Now that i own a small it-company, i had to deal with microsoft bs licenses and linux, which i love, but takes so much time to setup. I‘d love to see you guys push it to the limits!

[@KalleKilponen]

I used to admin a couple of G5 XServes and an XServe RAID back in the day, and they were pretty capable servers at the time. Though the pretty UI demonstrated in this video only got you so far. For any more advanced stuff, you needed to use the terminal. But if you were at all familiar with UNIX, that' wasn't a big deal and you could use them to do all sorts of neat stuff.

[@gtoger]

We had a customer colocate a handful of these things with us, including the drive shelf. They looked cool, but ran really hot. Funny how on tours, people looked right past these and ooh'd and ahh'd over the Cobalt RaQs.

[@systemchris]

To my knowledge a lot of the server specific programs were packaged up open source ones ... I run snow leopard server on my old hp server VMware :) but it's only useful to manage old Mac's lol

[@DavidHieber]

I was still running Mac OS X server 10.6 for email until last fall on a Mac Mini. This was a great presentation of how easy it was to setup compared to RHEL, although Red Hat is much easier in 2023 than it was in 2009.

[@ChristopherHailey]

Yeah, Linux is easier now, in fact easier than proprietary vendors now. It wasn't that hard in 2009, just there were always a couple of details that could be a pain especially on newer hardware. It was even more difficult back in the '90s. This biggest difference is that Linux gets better and better and Windows and Apple get worse and worse.

[@hubertnnn]

I feel we have a different definition of "easy". Or we watched a different video.

[@hubertnnn]

@@ChristopherHailey Linux is also getting worse. Unfortunately RedHat and Confluence are both trying to milk money out of Linux causing it to became bad. Luckily the Linux community so far is able to outpace both those companies so we have a net gain. But we are still getting garbage like systemd, wayland, snap or docker that hurts the Linux community and infrastructure by being forced onto us.

[@livelongandtroll9108]

09:58 That explanation was the most Apple thing that ever Apple.

[@jeffproppe]

Would love to see how you could bring this cool piece of tech back to usable "current day" function. Definitely love the vintage videos! As a Mac lover they are some of my favourite.

[@ruisantos4520]

I would like to have the fun on the follow up on this subject ... Tks for the excelent quality of your channel !! All the best, Rui

[@fatalicus]

I think we might still have these in one of our racks. We used these for imaging services (DeployStudio) and some apple related services, and when we decomisioned those services we kept one each of a G4, G5, Xserve2,1 (think it was that one, the middle relase of the Xeon variant) and a few of the mac mini servers.

[@jameshamilton413]

Thank you for making this I was a tech at a 3rd party repair shop and I’d fix these things - the front ssd would go bad but they were a real chore to diagnostically isolate. I had one repair where the ssd went bad and it had an entire schools Open Directory on it. That was a bad day. I also was an admin for a media company that used this for all their server stuff it was the best and most fun server to admin - it was also really tricky. I really miss those days! Thanks for doing this video LTT! I felt your pain hearing how you’d have to go down the rabbit hole just to get it up and running! I really miss this product!

[@MegaSunspark]

Yea, isn't it great how some organizations have their mission-critical data in one storage only and no backups what so ever? People in charge in such places who are non techies and have no clue about these things, who probably fired their last tech because he/she asked for a raise, will find out on that fateful day that there is no recourse for that lost data. ...and this person most likely will get promoted.

[@JD-go1nq]

More videos about the Xserve please. Also I have the 09' Xserve and swapped the main drives out with generic WD SAS drives.

[@persona2grata]

Wow, blast from the past. I used to install these professionally in ad agencies in the 90s.

[@nantukoprime]

I remember having to support this and a newer mac server while I was in college. This one was acting with an Xserve RAID as raid storage, but the newer one was a hypervisor to populate enough VMs of OSX for the app development classes, Objective-c, to have Xcode and a native environment where they can push their apps to some school owned devices rather than just internal emulators. The argument was that the transition to Swift was going to necessitate more lab time, and having access to a remote lab was a win/win.

[@keith.rocheck]

The Tiger and Leopard versions of OS X server had far superior configuration and logging for the services via a consolidated application. This was a fun throwback for me though. I inherited the Xserve in the shop I worked at the time but ended up loving it ... up until that Snow Leopard upgrade because it broke a bunch of our stuff, specifically custom configurations for in-house web dev, compared to the Tiger > Leopard upgrade that was seamless.

[@johnmarchant160]

Yes, definitely follow up! I'm a Mac enthusiast but haven't learned a ton about the Xserve

[@kenk7875]

Love the crazy Apple deep dives!

[@netrixtardis]

wasn't aware that we consider SCSI SCA 80 pin connector proprietary to Apple... I have those on SUN workstations and etc. Basically, it was the standard SCSI SCA connector for the early days of "hot-swapable" SCSI drives.... However, that is accurate that Apple firmware locked those drives to Xserves, couldn't add just any SCSI drives to servers.

[@homebuiltcamperdave5226]

I’m in IT for a school system. I LOVED the xserve servers. They were so reliable. Used to virtualize just about anything on them. Loved the redundant raid configurations. Used robbed able to easily be able to replace the drives. Would just keep a couple spares although I learned eventually you could swap westerndigital server level drives into the carriages. Never actually had a drive fail. Loved the dual nic. You could also get dual processor models. For years our xserves performed without thinking about them while other company products gave us more challenges. Sadly I do not have happy memories of the xserve software. For years we would have trouble losing the entire user databases. I finally learned how to back them up and restore them relatively easily. But eventually had to give in to Microsoft as managing windows logins and newer Mac clients just got too complicated and insecure. Happy memories overall.

[@kevin5073]

I ran 2 of these for three years and they were a breeze to run. Absolutely loved them.

[@nidaysinghal2759]

Love the way how Linus's team managed to make irritating background fan noise fun and soothing with a pinch of drumbeats!

[@drago6568]

Lord if your actually one of those delusional worthless losers that believes your supior to everyone else by wasting there whole life acting like they are better. Just get lost somewhere because your worth nothing as is

[@BuoyantToaster]

That OS drive actually looks like it uses a ZIF connector which is common on small form factor HDDs that are intended for mobile devices. Most MP3 players (including the iPods from 5th gen onwards) used ZIF drives before they started to use Flash storage.

[@thehobnob]

It could well be an iPod drive!

[@BuoyantToaster]

@@thehobnob yeah, I compared the drive you see in the video to an older iPod drive that I have laying around and I am very certain that they are the same.

[@TheAugustinian]

Our company used to use these for our build and test automation labs for Apple builds of our software. When they went away we had to move the the trash can Mac Pros which were frustratingly space inefficient for a large server lab. I think now it’s all minis which at least stack nicely.

[@johntheurer2265]

I remember my high schools media department (30+ macs) was all managed by 1 Mac mini running OSX server. It was a simple yet powerful solution for a lot of users.

[@cnelson3225]

The high school I went to about 10 years ago had about a 30\70 ratio of Mac computers to Windows and they also had a few x serve machines in each school. Much like you mentioned The MAC servers handled all the windows active directory and the Mac bootable images for each site. The non-mac servers handled the bulk file storage and windows images.

[@phantomsmithy]

It used to be SO nice to be able to setup hundreds of network boot user accounts and have everyone be able to use their stuff from ANY of the Macs in the shop.

[@elikelly1446]

Definitely follow it up ! Very interesting !

[@akenger]

I deployed a few xserves over the years. They were a solid platform. I still have one sitting in an original box that I just pulled out of storage. I’ll probably end up putting it on eBay to see if anyone wants it. I even had a spares kit kicking around somewhere too (logic board, power supply, etc).

[@treennumbers]

That tiny little drive was also used in some laptops at the time, but primarily I think it was used in iPods. The Dell D400 subnotebook series used them.

[@Dumptheclutchevo]

yep, the original MacBook Air for one.

[@fjcruzer1]

The little 1.8” HDD in the iPod classics were so neat to me growing up. I loved feeling the whole iPod buzz whenever I turned it on.

[@KidWiz3]

I have one of these, it's super neat! You can also absolutely change the drives, I have no original drives in mine and it boots/runs normally

[@3xcogitation]

For years I had 2 of these in a data center rack, they were pretty solid servers and we never experienced any hardware issues. I'd forgotten all about them.

[@00Klingon]

Back in the early 2000's a company I worked for got a bunch of Apple XServe G4 and later G5 models. I remember they used to suffer from a "smiling" issue where if you didn't reassemble them using the screws in the proper order with the right torque, the cases would sag (like a smile) and you'd have trouble closing them up when mounted in a rack. Good times.

[@pseudotasuki]

BTW, "Screen Sharing" is actually VNC under the hood. If I recall correctly, it can also be used in both directions with other VNC software.

[@nickwallette6201]

It can. I use a VNC client on my phone to connect to a Mac Mini on a pretty regular basis, and you can access other Macs with vnc colon slash slash hostname.

[@ChrisUKFF]

I remember I had to look after a couple of these in my first IT job in 2005. They were used primary to host a Sybase Database and App server for an App developed in Apple's "WebObjects" which is best described as a networked proprietary Java framework. Ironically all client access was on Windows! Wild times 🙃

[@imark7777777]

5:15 that looks like one of those parallel ATA micro ZIF connectors for iPod hard drives which is a semi standard.

[@InfernosReaper]

Man, this look into servers really reminds me how much big businesses got screwed over by server manufacturers when it came to serviceability and upgrade paths.

[@Neoxon619]

For a second, I thought you were going to do the last iPod they ever made. With that said, it’s interesting how their design language has changed over the last several years. While they do still make server-mounted Macs, they just look like the same dimensions as the standard Mac Pro but reoriented.

[@GetOffMyPhoneGoogle]

iPods were well made, but I still don't regret having my generic mp3 player that I could put every single song on from my laptop. Apple has been a scam since iTunes.

[@GigaDarth]

@@GetOffMyPhoneGoogle you can put mp3s on iPods so you don’t need iTunes

[@GetOffMyPhoneGoogle]

@@GigaDarth Only the early versions.

[@GigaDarth]

@@GetOffMyPhoneGoogle no all versions do you might need finder on a Mac though then drag your mp3 files into music give them the info if you want then open finder select sync music on finder and bam

[@OG-Jakey]

That's literally what this is though. A reoriented Mac Pro.

[@Klilley]

As multiple other comments have mentioned none of the drive connections are actually proprietary. Also there are easy workarounds for installing any of those macOS versions as well as the Server app. You can even go to newer versions of macOS then are officially supported. Would love to see some more videos doing upgrades to older hardware like this!

[@elchmartin]

Please continue ging down the xserve path.. Fun!

[@ekennedy6645]

Love the videos where you say nice things about Apple, few as they are. And, please do a follow-up! 🙏

[@d0cx]

Such a beautiful operating system. I've always loved the icons and dock from pre Yosemite.

[@tiestofalljays]

I really liked Snow Leopard.

[@johngaltline9933]

10.6 is still one of my favorites, 10.13 has grown on me, being the last that two dozen of my work machines will run as well as my 08 Pro.

[@d0cx]

@@tiestofalljays Me too

[@labmixz.]

I think it was 2006 when I installed 4 XServes at where I worked at the time. I remember the first thing I did after getting them rack mounted was setup integration with active directory, lol, that was "fun", especially because there weren't that many resources on it back then. Apparently, after I left that job, no one else knew how to use the servers, so they sold them like a year later.

[@arvs7356]

Our university actually had the Xeon version since 2008 and was running macOS server 5.6.1 until we migrated to managing Mac/iOS devices with Jamf and InTune in 2020. Despite the machine being over a decade old and running 24/7, I never had to request servicing on it (for the last 3 years we made it run). Quite a feat for an organization with over 5,000+ Mac and iOS devices.

[@DJ-BeerHunter]

we so need a follow up i personaly love playing & messing with old apple hardware

[@billbarton]

Yes! More videos on this. I’ve had one sitting near my desk for a couple years trying to decide how to use it and just can’t bring myself to get rid of it.