I'm volunteering with a non-for-profit group. Part of the mandate is to provide local internet services to a particular part of town. Apparently all the agreements are in place and the papers signed. I've been asked to extend the range of an existing public access service as well as provide replacement web space for half a dozen groups/clubs. The hardware is older PC hardware donated to one of the groups. I'm not sure exactly what they have (neither are they) so I'm going to assume I have to put things together from scratch. Old hardware is more available than money.
I'm looking for a couple of easy to install and maintain packages. Specifically free router software and free web server software. If it can be set up in an afternoon it would be handy.
At the moment I'm concentrating on the router software. I've been to Sourceforge and Freshmeat and found half a dozen. The group in charge want wireless in the new location. I'm not sure some of the older packages can handle wireless cards. Since the building they have to house the machines is quite long I figured one at either end connected via a wired router in the middle would be a good idea.
I haven't set up dedicated servers like this before. Yes the people in charge know this and still want me to figure it out. I'd figure something still being maintained would be better than something which hasn't seen an update since 2000. I'd also guess OpenBSD would be preferred over Linux (or Windows). What are people using for this sort of thing?
Later Mike
Mike, you'll probably get as many opinions on this as there are people on this list.
First, it's not really clear to me what you are trying to do. What exactly is meant by "provide local internet services" ? How is it being provided? PC terminals on a LAN? Wireless? Dialup?
"extend the range of an existing public access service" seems to imply wireless of some kind? By extend do you mean add more wireless access points?
As far as providing hosting services for web sites, these days it simply doesn't make sense to do it yourself. There are a litany of very high quality hosting providers in the US which offer hosting that includes a free domain name, email, tons of storage and bandwidth, web based site management tools etc. for less than $5/month. You simply can not beat this so I'd strongly recommend this option for anyone.
For the router/firewall, I would choose something like a Linksys WRT54GL and put some custom Linux firmware on it like Tomato. These devices are cheap and reliable and since you mentioned wifi it would have everything you need. Specific roll-your-own dedicated hardware is almost always overkill unless you have a specific requirement for it.
Regards,
John Lange wrote:
Mike, you'll probably get as many opinions on this as there are people on this list.
True enough. I figured it would be a good place to start.
First, it's not really clear to me what you are trying to do. What exactly is meant by "provide local internet services" ? How is it being provided? PC terminals on a LAN? Wireless? Dialup?
In this location there are two public access PC terminals on a LAN. The group wants me to add wireless (two access points) to the setup.
"extend the range of an existing public access service" seems to imply wireless of some kind? By extend do you mean add more wireless access points?
That's one option. There is an existing public access service run by one of the groups a couple of blocks away. They want to extend the range to cover this particular building. The building is out of range of the existing service. I gather they also want to provide local content on machines which are only accessible from certain locations/routers.
As far as providing hosting services for web sites, these days it simply doesn't make sense to do it yourself. There are a litany of very high quality hosting providers in the US which offer hosting that includes a free domain name, email, tons of storage and bandwidth, web based site management tools etc. for less than $5/month. You simply can not beat this so I'd strongly recommend this option for anyone.
If they were starting from scratch then I'd agree. In this case they have government funding for the connection to the net. Their previous machine hasn't needed maintenance for close to 10 years. Nobody has looked at it in all this time. The machine has since been sold a couple of times so it's no longer under their control. Apparently it is sitting quietly in a corner somewhere awaiting the day an audit shows the current owners they are effectively hosting half a dozen groups web sites for free. They are hoping they could just drop in a newer computer at the new site at no cost. As I said, they have a fair few machines they can use for this purpose.
For the router/firewall, I would choose something like a Linksys WRT54GL and put some custom Linux firmware on it like Tomato. These devices are cheap and reliable and since you mentioned wifi it would have everything you need. Specific roll-your-own dedicated hardware is almost always overkill unless you have a specific requirement for it.
I would agree if I knew they had one (or the money to get one). I've asked if they could locate any wireless "home routers" in the warehouse. No word back yet. More likely than not they will ask me to throw in a couple of NICs and a wireless card into a PC and implement it that way. The requirement is not to spend money, and use some of the equipment sitting in the warehouse.
All this is a little earlier than they planned. They had a couple of machines sitting in the corner no longer doing what they wanted so I set up FreeNAS on one of them. Then I asked if they wanted me to do something with the other one...
Regards,
Later Mike
I have a Mac plus and a number of accessories for it, including a printer and 2 external hard drives.
The Mac video display will usually not come on, though sometimes it will if left to run for a few minutes - I understand this is a common and easily fixed problem for those who knew the Mac, but I really don't have the room or use for it any more.
I do have some sensitive information on the external drives. Is there a reliable way to guarantee the info is erased without destroying the drives?
The ideal solution for me, if such a thing exists, would be to run an emulator in a modern machine (Mac, PC or Linux running on Intel), that would be able to access the old drives through hardware that connects the old attachments to USB. Emulators may be available, but I don't know about the hardware.
I also have a Commodore 64 with external hardware that I would like to emulate.
I also have a crowbar and a sledge hammer, but a more elegant approach is preferred.
-Dan
Dan Martin GP Hospital Practitioner Computer Scientist ummar143@shaw.ca (204) 831-1746 answering machine always on
Dan Martin wrote:
I have a Mac plus and a number of accessories for it, including a printer and 2 external hard drives.
The Mac video display will usually not come on, though sometimes it will if left to run for a few minutes - I understand this is a common and easily fixed problem for those who knew the Mac, but I really don't have the room or use for it any more.
Must be 20 years or more ago since I repaired one, but I think there are a couple of capacitors on the video board that are the first things to go on a Mac plus.
I do have some sensitive information on the external drives. Is there a reliable way to guarantee the info is erased without destroying the drives?
Secure erase overwrites the drives multiple times to ensure that none of the original information is retrievable.
The ideal solution for me, if such a thing exists, would be to run an emulator in a modern machine (Mac, PC or Linux running on Intel), that would be able to access the old drives through hardware that connects the old attachments to USB. Emulators may be available, but I don't know about the hardware.
The drives would be SCSI-1 (5MB/s), there are cables/adaptors that would do it, but I do not have one anymore, ebay is probably your best bet to find one. Do you want to copy the data off the drives before the secure erase? Do you happen to know if they are formatted MFS, or HFS? I don't know if there are MFS drivers for linux, but one exists for Mac OS X (readonly, Apple sample code) http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/MFSLives/index.html. Perhaps someone on the list can lend you a cable, if not, I have an older powermac g3 that has a scsi interface (but I do not have any scsi cables) that you could borrow to do the copy and erase.
Peter
On 18-Sep-08, at 10:29 AM, Peter O'Gorman wrote:
Secure erase overwrites the drives multiple times to ensure that none of
the original information is retrievable.
Yes - if I can write to the drives.
The ideal solution for me, if such a thing exists, would be to run an emulator in a modern machine (Mac, PC or Linux running on Intel), that would be able to access the old drives through hardware that connects the old attachments to USB. Emulators may be available, but I don't know about the hardware.
The drives would be SCSI-1 (5MB/s), there are cables/adaptors that would do it, but I do not have one anymore, ebay is probably your best bet to find one.
Good suggestion. One hard drive cable (an Apple drive) appears to have a 19-pin connector, the same as Apple's floppy drive connector. The second party hard drive has a 25-pin connector (same physical connector for RS-232, but different voltages etc.)
Do you want to copy the data off the drives before the secure erase? Do you happen to know if they are formatted MFS, or HFS? I don't know if there are MFS drivers for linux, but one exists for Mac OS X (readonly, Apple sample code)
I don't know what format, but good to know some drivers are still available. It would be nice, though not critical, to copy the info. If the drivers do not allow me to write to the drives (to destroy the info) then I might have to physically destroy them.
http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/MFSLives/index.html. Perhaps someone on the list can lend you a cable, if not, I have an older powermac g3 that has a scsi interface (but I do not have any scsi cables) that you could borrow to do the copy and erase.
Peter
Peter O'Gorman http://pogma.com
Thanks Peter!
On 18-Sep-08, at 10:11 AM, Raymond J. Henry wrote:
I believe I have some SCSI cards kicking around with external ports, would have to check. What connector do those Mac cables use? The centronics type, if I recall rightly. So easy wipe there, plug it into a PC and away you go.
Then if I could get the PC to see the drive at all, could reformat it.
See above re cables.
As for emulating C64, check here: http://www.zzap64.co.uk/c64/c64emulators.html
Thanks - same problem for the 64, ie connecting devices.
Dan Martin GP Hospital Practitioner Computer Scientist ummar143@shaw.ca (204) 831-1746 answering machine always on
Dan Martin wrote:
Good suggestion. One hard drive cable (an Apple drive) appears to have a 19-pin connector,
Wow! Must be an HD20. That's amazing. Wikipedia tells me that there were adaptors that converted these to scsi devices back in the day... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_Disk_20 Probably hard to find such a thing these days. I worked at Apple in Cork, Ireland as an intern in 1988, and I have never seen one of these :-) I think the hammer and a magnet may be your best course of action here.
the same as Apple's floppy drive connector.
The second party hard drive has a 25-pin connector (same physical connector for RS-232, but different voltages etc.)
This one is scsi, using Apple's DB25 connector. Apple stopped shipping macs with scsi relatively recently, chances are pretty good that you can find a usb -> scsi adaptor on ebay.
I don't know what format,
Looks like HFS was introduced before the Mac Plus, so chances are good that if you can connect the device to a linux or mac os x system, it can be read, and of course, reformatted (don't forget to overwrite everything as well).
Peter
On 18 Sep, Peter O'Gorman wrote:
The Mac video display will usually not come on, though sometimes it will if left to run for a few minutes - I understand this is a common and easily fixed problem for those who knew the Mac, but I really don't have the room or use for it any more.
Must be 20 years or more ago since I repaired one, but I think there are a couple of capacitors on the video board that are the first things to go on a Mac plus.
If it's known to be the caps, I can repair them if you can't do it yourself. I stock many cap values, though some monitor ones (esp the high voltage side) might require special order.
My mobo cap repair service is really booming. Seems that now some 2003 boards also have bad caps (I previously thought it limited to 2001-2002): http://www.tecnopolis.ca/tecnopolis/leakycaps.html
Dan Martin wrote:
I have a Mac plus and a number of accessories for it, including a printer and 2 external hard drives.
I have one as well. It's still useful for playing old games. A number of companies have released their games free to download on the web. The key is finding it.
The printer and the hard drives will be difficult to use on anything but an Apple// or Mac of the same era.
The Mac video display will usually not come on, though sometimes it will if left to run for a few minutes - I understand this is a common and easily fixed problem for those who knew the Mac, but I really don't have the room or use for it any more.
Others have addressed the issue. I will confirm I had the same work done by a friend who may or may not be in Winnipeg anymore. It works.
I do have some sensitive information on the external drives. Is there a reliable way to guarantee the info is erased without destroying the drives?
With old drives you could fill up the drive with a large file then reformat a number of times. I think the number was between 10 and 13. If you want the info backed up, I did at one point have a minimal security rating from the federal and provincial governments (it lapsed).
The ideal solution for me, if such a thing exists, would be to run an emulator in a modern machine (Mac, PC or Linux running on Intel), that would be able to access the old drives through hardware that connects the old attachments to USB. Emulators may be available, but I don't know about the hardware.
There *is* a 68K Mac emulator available for Linux you can download. The people I talked with say it works. Again, they use it mostly for the old games so YMMV.
I also have a Commodore 64 with external hardware that I would like to emulate.
There is quite a bit of development in the Commodore 64/128 world these days. So much so it is crossing over into the Apple// world. You my want to take a gander at the appropriate newsgroups for a couple of weeks. Additionally I suspect there is a C128 emulator available for download as well. I mean if they can do the 68K Mac and Apple// then they can certainly do the C64.
I also have a crowbar and a sledge hammer, but a more elegant approach is preferred.
If nothing else the Mac can be used as a fish tank. Several people have discussed how they did it... Might be fun to scrap the insides, replace the monitor part with something new, and have a Soecris machine running the 68K emulator...
-Dan
Dan Martin GP Hospital Practitioner Computer Scientist ummar143@shaw.ca (204) 831-1746 answering machine always on
Later Mike
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Dan Martin -
John Lange -
Mike Pfaiffer -
Peter O'Gorman -
Trevor Cordes