Resurrecting a Fossil as a Server

Or "How I'll Likely Spend My Saturday Afternoon"

I've had some random motivations lately.  Two weeks ago, I got bored enough to deal with holiday crowds and went to Worst Buy for thermal paste.  A couple hours after that, I'd taken apart two older (one from 2006, the other from 2008) laptops to reapply the thermal paste; these machines no longer overheat, which is a win.  Over the course of several evenings after, I imported every CD in the apartment into a music library, in lossless format, on the older of the two laptops.

This is a redundant copy of the music library, but that's for a different post, I suppose.  Look for something soon about minidiscs. 

This evening, I had the gumption to downgrade the OS on my laptop.  Upon success, I made an installer for my other half to downgrade her machine this weekend.  I decided, with a bit of encouragement, to experiment with a home server setup while my laptop was tied up. 

The machine will turn 21 this year, being a 2003 model PowerMac G5.  Single processor at 1.8 GHz, with 6GB RAM.  Perfect to play with OS X 10.4 Server, I reckoned, and I was correct.  Installation was as advertised, and setting up a server of that vintage isn't much of a challenge, especially for the purposes of testing, "what can I do here?"  Let's call it about 65 minutes between the install, the test setup, and placing a few files.

I was able to connect to the server with no issue with the 2006 MBP, which was no real surprise - it's being set up with software of that vintage to play nicely with the other antiquated systems.  The surprise was that, with almost no effort, I'm able to hit the server from my modern system.  Streaming video from the server worked with no issue.  I was able to do the same from my Windows partition, too.

I plan to do some more robust testing this weekend, including alternatives of a newer variant of OS X (10.5-10.7 Server) or running a Linux distro on Intel hardware.  But I really like the idea of using an absolute antique - I have a 450 MHz G4 in the garage that would run OS X Server - as a home server.  Seems very much like something I'd do.