Interest for Old Equipment?

[Stephen Lien]

I have a few objects here at Laporte that someone might be able to find a home for...I don't want to dump them if someone might find some use for them.

Item #1:
X-Serve, 1U Rackmount, built in 2003, 1.4 GHz G4, 60GB SATA drive, 1GB RAM, OSX 10.4 Server.

Item #2:
Nobilis Server, Tower, built in 2003, dual 1.4 GHz Pentium III, 5x36GB SCSI RAID-5 disk array (w/ extra loose 36GB spare drive), 1 GB RAM, Educational Win2K Server license.

The X-Serve was bought back when the district thought it might be moving to an all-Mac school. When we didn't, the server has sat unused for five years. The Nobilis server has been our trusty Windows DC and file server, and is currently in need of a replacement processor. I'd be happy to fix it up for anyone who might be able to find a good home for it.

[Jon Bergeron]

I would have use for the xserve. Please let me know what you want for it.

[Stephen Lien]

Do you mean for trade? If so, what do you have available?

I could really use a few laserjet printers, or toners (hp 1010/1505/2200/2300/8100/4600) if you have them available.

Otherwise, I'd consider it's market value at about $350.

(And one small correction -- The processor speed is 1.33 GHz, not 1.4 GHz.)

Jon Bergeron said:

I would have use for the xserve. Please let me know what you want for it.

[Jon Bergeron]

I have a couple of used LaserJet 4200s that I'd be willing to trade. I'll see what I have left of 4600 toner as well.

[Stephen Lien]

I would definitely be interested in trading for a couple used 4200 printers & toner. I'd just like to know a page count on the two printers, and whether they have toners in them or not (not crucial...would just like to know when we make the trade and for testing when we get them). Also, just let me know what 4600 toners you have available.

I'll need to draw up a proposal and get authorization for the trade from our school board. Their next meeting is October 14th. If all goes well, we could set up a swap at November's tech meeting.


Jon Bergeron said:

I have a couple of used LaserJet 4200s that I'd be willing to trade. I'll see what I have left of 4600 toner as well.

[Bud Kading]

I am looking for a server I can set up in a church, put VMWare on it with a couple server2003 VMs. I did check ebay and say some HP units that look good. Right now no money available for that. The unit would need at least 2gb of memory. The 5 36gb HDs would do the job for storage and I think 2 working processors should be sufficient speed. What do you need for the server?

[Stephen Lien]

Well, the only problem w/ the server is that one of the processors failed last October. I can get a replacement part for $30 to get it up-and-running again. And if you need 2 GB of RAM, I think that would be another $30. (I don't know the exact price, because I don't know the exact type of RAM off the top of my head...I'll have to check.)

If you have something to trade from a school, I'd be happy to trade. If you're looking at a monetary value, I think that $150 would be a fair compensation (and for that $150, I'd get the RAM upgraded and the CPU fixed).

Until the processor quit, the server has been quite the workhorse. The only problem I had with the thing was the tape drive failing. (But, hey, it's a tape drive.) It's still a good server. (The dimensions are a little large...it's about as wide and tall as a tower, but about 1.5x deep.) I'd hate to just have to chuck the thing.

If you're looking for other cheap servers, the website http://www.stikc.com has some good refurbished Dell PowerEdge servers. There's a PowerEdge 2650 2U server w/ 2GB RAM, dual 3.0 GHz Xeon processors, and 3x73GB SCSI drives listed for $329.

Bud Kading said:

I am looking for a server I can set up in a church, put VMWare on it with a couple server2003 VMs. I did check ebay and say some HP units that look good. Right now no money available for that. The unit would need at least 2gb of memory. The 5 36gb HDs would do the job for storage and I think 2 working processors should be sufficient speed. What do you need for the server?

[Stephen Lien]

Alright...I have another reason for hating Apple. I haven't turned on this XServe in years. Boot it up, and it gives me the "Finder Folder / Question Mark" error. I try to reinstall OSX 10.4 on the server, and I see a red light on the ADM module.

So, I swap out the disk in the sled for another Apple-certified 60GB drive I pulled from another machine. I give that disk a spin. Refuses to boot 10.4 DVD.

Reset NVRAM. Finds the DVD. Installs Tiger. Find the Clock is reset to 1970. I don't have a new battery, so I swap the battery with one from a working Apple eMac that has a working battery.

Boot Tiger. Shut down server. Slide back on the cover & Lock the drive caddy. Power on the XServe once more to verify everything's OK. "Finder Folder / Question Mark" error. Ugh.

Swap disk drive with 3rd 60GB pulled Apple-rated disk drive (last one I have). Install Tiger, etc., etc., wash, rinse, repeat (except the battery). After three reboots, either another "Finder Folder / Question Mark" error, or an empty white screen. Ugh.

Swapped the disk drive to a separate drive bay. Success. Tiger boots just fine. Until...a couple reboots later, and another "Finder Folder / Question Mark" error.

Played around with it some more. Either I get Tiger to load up just fine, except the mouse doesn't work, or I get the "Finder Folder / Question Mark" error (and OSX doesn't load), or I get an empty white screen. Patterns are inconsistent. If I reset the NVRAM, Tiger won't load off the drive, but I can relaunch Tiger Server installation, and use Disk Utility to "reinitialize" the drive.

Any ideas on what the matter might be?

[Stephen Lien]

I tried swapping the mouse with another one, and the keyboard with another one, to no avail. Both keyboards and mice worked fine on other apples.

Seth Tramm said:

Might sound funny, but besides the battery, this might be a mouse issue. If the mouse button is held down during startup (or is malfunctioning) it will cause the startup issue you are describing.

Try unplugging the keyboard and mouse before a restart. If this works, you know your mouse is the culprit.

Let me know what happens, I will keep thinking...

[Stephen Lien]

Okay, here's a further list of things that don't work correctly...

1) Unable to boot from any CD. Likewise, OSX cannot mount any CD. Anything I put in, the spindle spins up, then spins down two seconds later, and the CD spits out.

2) Unable to boot into open firmware.

Any regular XServe users ever witness these peculiar symptoms?

Stephen Lien said:

I tried swapping the mouse with another one, and the keyboard with another one, to no avail. Both keyboards and mice worked fine on other apples.

Seth Tramm said:

Might sound funny, but besides the battery, this might be a mouse issue. If the mouse button is held down during startup (or is malfunctioning) it will cause the startup issue you are describing.

Try unplugging the keyboard and mouse before a restart. If this works, you know your mouse is the culprit.

Let me know what happens, I will keep thinking...

[Stephen Lien]

Only one drive. The original drive red-lighted, but I have two 60GB Apple-rated spares that I pulled from other Macs. I swapped the disk in the sled with another, and the drive was functional again. (Although, I should also mention, that to get it functional, I had to move it to a different drive bay. Anytime I put the working drive in bay #1, I get a "Finder folder / Question mark" error at boot.) After a lot of rebooting, experimenting, resetting the PRAM and NVRAM, and other random poking and prodding, I managed to get the disk drive to boot (came built w/ combo DVD/CD-RW drive), and managed to get 10.4 installed.

I have the AHT CD for both the XServe as well as other eMac AHT CDs. The disk refuses to boot. Currently, no disk is mountable, regardless of whether I have it in at start-up or if I try and mount it after 10.4 successfully loaded. The only keyboard combo that I can successfully do at boot is verbose mode. (Although, I haven't tried single-user mode yet...) If I try and boot into OpenFirmware, boot from CD, or boot into target mode, I get the Apple gray-screen to appear for three seconds w/ the regular apple logo, then a black screen. Once it black screens, disk activity stops and the machine halts. I know that the disk is fine, because I successfully mounted and booted it on other eMacs. I also know that the DVD drive works, not only because I was able to use it to get 10.4 working, but also because when I swapped it with a slim DVD-R drive that I pulled from an external enclosure that I know is functional, the old drive worked fine in the enclosure (on another Apple), but the slim DVD-R exhibited the same symptoms in the XServe that the old drive exhibited.

[Stephen Lien]

Alright, more investigations:

When I had the Disk in bay #3, the DVD drive refused to mount. When I tried an external CD-ROM USB drive, same behavior. Any disk I put in there would get spit out at me again.

When I moved the disk to bay #1, the disk was unreadable. However, the DVD drive was functional and would not spit out CDs. But when I tried to launch the AHT, I got a "Invalid memory address at %SRR0" error in the OpenFirmware prompt.

Then I reset the NVRAM in OpenFirmware. Now the AHT disk is readable. When I launched the program and did the extended test, the logic board tested OK, but I got an "Error Code 2STF/1/4:" error when trying to do the "Mass Storage" test.

I removed the disk entirely and am currently running the AHT disk again. I'll keep you posted.

[Stephen Lien]

The more I work on this, the less I think it's a hardware issue. I think it's more that the odd hardware behavior are symptoms of something else.

When I did the following:

1) Move the disk drive back to drive bay 1
2) Reset the PROM and NVRAM

Then the DVD was mountable again. So, I ran AHT. As a result, I got the disk drive error. Then, I...

3) Moved the disk drive to drive bay 2.
4) Reset the PROM and NVRAM again.

Then I ran AHT, and the disk drive was scannable, and no errors occurred whatsoever. However, when I tried to reboot the machine and boot from the disk, the hard disk was again unbootable. It would try to boot the disk drive, fail, then automatically roll back to booting the DVD. So, suddenly, I was stuck in AHT. So I...

5) Replaced the PROM battery with a second battery
6) Moved the disk drive to drive bay 3
7) Went into OpenFirmware, force-ejected the AHT disk, and reset the NVRAM again.

And now everything's peachy-keen. The DVD drive works. The hard disk booted w/o error. Server monitor reports that everything's running w/ a green light. And I'm currently zeroing out all the empty space on the disk drive w/o error. (Interesting other tidbit: back when the server was booting to OSX w/o mouse support, Server Monitor was reporting red-lights on both blowers, citing failure, even though the blowers were operating normally.)

I can't imagine that there's any hardware failure if the disk can work for four hours straight to zero-out the empty space on a disk drive.

Now, my prediction is that when I unplug the machine, then plug it back in again, I'll be back to error-heaven again with the machine.

--15 minutes later--

Sure enough, the server won't boot again. Then I hold down the PROM reset button, then open up OpenFirmware, reset-nvram / set-defaults / reset-all, and I can boot the AHT disk again. Though when I tried to boot into single-user mode, fsck through conniption after conniption and said the file directory structure was corrupt. Might have had something to do with zeroing out the empty disk space...I don't know.

My suspicions are either:

1) Disk and/or sled bad. (But system still acts goofy even w/o a disk drive.)
2) ATA controller board is bad. (But if the controller board is bad, how come I can get the disk to work fine some of the time?)
3) NVRAM corrupt. (But then, why can I run /usr/sbin/nvram -p in single-user mode and see all the data in tact?)
4) Gremlins.

I'm thinking #4 at this point. As a PC man and not a Mac man, I just have as good a handle on this.

And no, this is my only XServe. I arrived at the school six years ago, and this lonely little guy was sitting there and was supposed to be the replacement for our Windows Server woes. I never touched the thing for two years, then dinked around with it a little for fun, but otherwise let it be. Now, when I'm trying to get it working for someone else, it fails miserably.

Not an Apple fan. Nope, no sir.