this is an Apple computer but unlike the
ones that you've used before it's not pretty because it's intended to be
hidden away in a server rack I know right like what I mean when you think of
Apple you think of consumer electronics because that's the only thing that they
advertise but they not only made servers
but they quietly did so for over 20
years and by the time they reached their final form these things could be found
in businesses and schools throughout the world being used for everything from
file serving to Media workflow acceleration to Microsoft active
directory Services wait an apple server
for a Microsoft anyway the point is they were unlike other Apple products in many
ways for one the xserve lineup was
positioned as a budget alternative to premium solutions from PC makers it's
upside down World it raises so many questions like why was it so cheap did
it have any redeeming qualities why did Apple ultimately pull the plug to find
out we bought the last xserve machine
that Apple ever produced and we're going to take it out for a rip this is going
to be fun Bud fun like this segue to our
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below we considered the 2009 xserve 31
to be the last real server from Apple because while there were server versions
of the Mac Mini until 2012 they were basically the same as their desktop
counterparts just with some minor tweaks to the specs with third party
accessories they could be used to fill the app- shaped void in an
organization's rack but it was pretty clear that Apple's Focus had moved on
and over the next 10 years they would slowly chip away at the functionality of
their macOS server software until its eventual death in
2022 but enough about that we've got a Mac server in its prime and this is my
first Hands-On what exactly did they
think different well for a server she's
definitely pretty slick and stylish and weighs only a mere uh 40 lb with most of
the drive Bays not populated the system identifier button is on both the front
and the back when you press it it flashes both of them which is a nice
little quality of life feature that makes it easy to locate on the rack on
the other side of our front USB is our Ethernet port lights then right of that
are the system activity lights if you hold down the power button and the ident
Iden ifier button to boot that allows you to use the lights to select a boot
method without requiring a monitor or any input devices now given its utility
as a file server and a media server you'd think it would have a lot more
Drive Bays it has only three by default
ah an xer server would normally be paired with an X raid which as you
probably guessed is a rackm mounted raid enclosure that would sit either right
above it or right below it giving it an additional 14 drive base now obviously
we're not going to deploy this thing so we don't need one of those but we do
need at least one and we were missing all of them out of the box so we had to
order one off of eBay as it turns out the sleds are proprietary which isn't
uncommon but the connectors are also
proprietary which is uncommon we
received what may have been one of the last remaining sealed X serve drives in
existence fun fact by the way for both the xserve and the X-ray the drive
themselves are just standard SATA and SAS hard drives and then beyond adapting
them to this proprietary interface Apple also went a step further and vendor
locked them through the firmware so even if you could get your hands on random
extra sleds you couldn't simply upgrade them with off the-shelf Replacements
bastards they weren't the only ones who pulled this kind of crap but that
doesn't make it okay I can't wait to take this apart this thing is just kind
of wild to me right some stuff may not be normal today but was at the time like
having a slim optical drive in the front of your server but other things were
weird even then like the fact that it has firewire ports and mini DisplayPort
instead of just basic VGA how does Apple
always manage to make Hardware look so
pretty and what are you you look like a weird little Drive
of some sort yo Tanner yes what the
devil is this little guy here that
little guy is the primary hard drive for it so even drive yeah even when all
three of these are empty your operating system is still going to go on there and
it uses a proprietary connector because
just it can I'm assuming I'm going to find the fans under the cool little
shroud yay so there they are they may be
short but boy are they ever thick what
is this card this thing is chalk full of
what appears to be both nand Flash and
Dam Tanner when you told me this thing is basically just a 2009 Mac Pro but in
server form I didn't think I was going to be finding whatever this is would
that possibly be a raid card oh yes that
is very possible confirmed this is a
RAID card and you could have apparently buy this raid card as a PCIe card as
well that is hilarious and if I had to guess I would
say this plug right here is the same one
that this one is using for its backup battery because I don't see a backup
battery in here and under normal circumstances you would want to have a
battery on a hardware raid card because that way any data that was in Flight
like sitting in the cash on the raid card about to be written to the hard
drives in the event of a sudden power loss could be preserved by keeping the
card powered so that it could be flushed to the drives after the fact or it's
possible that Apple assumed that if this thing is sitting in a data center
somewhere oh no that there should be no
reason for it to suddenly lose power I need to find all those screws
fortunately I've got the LT store screwdriver complete with magnet screw
finding bit hopefully these are fair as screws ah yes they are oh good one two
got another dual gigabit network card here I'm assuming this is just gigabit
right yes yeah all right nothing special about that but what I'm really
interested in is this card under it you know what this looks like an mxm
module is that what it is is this a GPU
yep why the hell are they putting laptop
gpus in servers huh oh and it's NVIDIA
this is before they started quarreling and uh didn't use any of each other's
products anymore for anything what is this I believe that is a
gt130 I love when Apple Builds an upgradability into their products and
then completely abandons them like the 2019 Mac Pro you know this reminds me of
the 2019 Mac Pro in more ways than one you've got the unrealized upgrade
potential and then you've also got the fact that it's uh rack mounted server
version of what is essentially the same Hardware running the same software Mac
OS it's just that when the 2019 version
rolled around and we thought o maybe they'll you know pay attention to the
server space again clearly that didn't happen and oh wait yeah I guess that's
not really a difference cuz that also happened here they were also both based
on Intel platforms with risk-based CPUs
that would proceed and follow them one difference is that I wouldn't describe
the xserve lineup as a failure so where
did these things come from well it was ultimately Apple's strong foothold in
the education and media sectors that really kept these things alive so
naturally those are two areas that remained strong targets when their
Enterprise equipment first started rolling out with the new OS X created as
a Rebrand with the return of Steve Jobs and the later release of the iPod so to
continue to fit into these markets they allowed easy integration into existing
Windows heavy environment ments easy creation and maintenance of workflows
for things like Network installation of newly purchased Mac and a video podcast
creation system that required minimal human intervention that ran best on xerf
this last point is also important because it allowed Apple to help
saturate the podcast section of iTunes with videos that were made to be viewed
on things like the existing iPod video and then later the iPhone Educators
could put lectures online media companies could expand to new mediums
and enthusiasts were rewarded for their purchase with some of that delicious
sweet content M
content oh yeah right we're supposed to be making content about this uh let's
turn it on wow those are just about the
brightest network activity indicator LEDs I have ever seen I'm here for it I
appreciate that hey look at that uh
what's my name LT daddy oh sorry what we're booted up into snow left
but the way we got here was very complicated with no drive for it the
system initially booted into recovery for yosity but recovery would get stuck
because it required an Apple ID well
Apple IDs these days require two Factor authentication which is something that
was missing from the signin process on our yosd recovery Drive the work around
is to put the 2fa number at the end of the password but then it refused to
authenticate because the TLs and SS L encryption that were baked into the
operating system we using expired keys and there was no way to update them the
newest macOS version that supports the xerf is lcy 10 so you might say just
install that right wrong when you try to create a bootable USB installer on
something more modern like uh 2017 MacBook Pro it'll tell you that lcy 10
will not run on the machine and refuse to create the device Apple if you need a
working operating system on a machine in order to install an operating system on
that same machine users with faulty drives on older systems are forced to
take their devices to The Genius Bar I am not rolling up to the Guildford Apple
Store with this thing they hate me enough already so we settled on Snow
Leopard server it installed fine though
it still refused to run the installer for lcy 10 because we needed to install
software updates software updates wouldn't install because there was no
app store and the Apple website couldn't be accessed to download the App Store
and Safari because the old version of safari doesn't support apple.com
security so we had to download Chrome to download the App Store to run the
updator to run the installer to update the operating system and then finally
with lcan installed all the server software was missing as it turns out
after snow leopard server Apple stopped producing server specific versions of
their operating systems made the old bakedin programs stop working after the
upgrade and then they released the OS 10 server Suite as an app in the app store
it only cost 20 bucks so no big deal
except that they stopped selling it in April of 2022 and we have no way to get
it we settled then on dual booting so that we can show off both the latest
software and the X serves features Apple
we're not saying you have to support your old Hardware but to intentionally
make it impossible to use that's just plain
rude maist server super cool uh wait
okay so sorry is this the page oh yeah very cool right out of the box then the
web server is running and we just have to go to the IP address of the server
that brings us to a portal for various web services that are available then on
the dock we've got the default server applications that set this apart from
the Reg snow leopard that would have come on your late 2009 MacBook server
preferences allows you to change basic settings for users in groups file
sharing which functions the way you would assume a file sharing server would
mail and IAL which would allow it to theoretically function as a replacement
for Microsoft Exchange I chat The Familiar chat client from the era though
this time hosted for use within work groups which allowed organizations to
maintain their own chat logs inhouse and
they could Federate with xmpp servers to allow for chat between members and
different organizations it's got web which handled the web server with the UI
making it super easy to implement simple internet Pages VPN which allowed users
to connect using layer 2 or point-to-point tunneling time machine
which has the server function as a storage place for other Macs in the
network to dump their time machine backups and security which is pretty
much just firewall rules there are also some icons to see general information
text logs and system usage graphs all of
this stuff looks very Apple so far right in a yeah it works but it can't be
customized much going of way and if that's how you want to manage your
server it's kind of a great product cuz
that's how it'll function for you but right beside server preferences here is
the server admin button and this is the
real powerhouse this window gives access
to much more minute details and some other functions that were hidden from
view in preferences for some reason
puzzle ly this is the only way to access things like SMB for acting as a PC
compatible file server QuickTime streaming and podcast producer podcast
producer was a pretty cool idea that allowed networked users to easily record
video podcasts following workflows that were created beforehand in podcast
composer two cameras could be connected to the server and then could be recorded
from at once with the recording process controlled using the web portal or the
podcast capture application on Mac once the recording was complete it would
automatically be encoded and could even be published automatically if that's
what the workflow called for if there were multiple servers in the network
configured through X grid CPU heavy tasks like encoding could be offloaded
to those servers this was probably a pretty great system to record things
like University lectures without requiring too much human intervention or
tying up all the compute power from a single server moving on there's workg
group manager which is exactly what it sounds like podcast composer which
allowed management of things like the workflows used in podcast producer
screen sharing which worked like most VNC remote access tools but was Mac
specific and system image utility a
super cool tool for creating customized Network bootable and installable images
of snow leopard this could be used to deploy standardized installs to a lot of
computers at once or to have networked computers boot right off of the image on
the server considering that this breadth of
features came baked into a server OS that had an easy to ous guey with no
cost added on top of the hardware it's a little surprising that the product
wasn't popular enough to survive especially when you account for Windows
Server absolutely ridiculous pricing structure I mean not only does Windows
Server cost more than Desktop Windows the client access licenses or cows mean
that you have to pay an additional license fee for every user who is going
to access that server or come to think
of it maybe that's what makes all of this not surprising at all like any
Corporation Apple's raison Detra is to make money and being a forward-looking
company Apple would have clearly recognized that the world was moving to
cloud-based storage and services rather than locally hosted ones so with that in
mind are they better off trying to literally compete and increase their
one-time licensing costs for these bare metal servers or are they better off
charging users monthly to build up their own centralized infrastructure and
subscription-based revenue well I think
we all know the answer to that but that doesn't mean the ex serve is totally
dead there's an active Enthusiast community that is dedicated to keeping
these machines in service turning them into personal servers budget Mac Pro
Replacements or whatever Franken monstrosities their Little Mac loving
Minds can come up with LTT and Frankenstein monstrosities actually go
hand in hand and what better way to monsterfy something than to turn it into
a formidable gaming machine now unfortunately we ran into some
challenges getting that going for today not the least of which was that we
wanted to upgrade the CPUs for better performance and it turns out Apple uses
delited zons like what are they the the
play it safe fruit company or are they a bunch of mad scientists enthusiasts I
can never tell anyway let me know in the comments if you want to see a followup I
think that would be a lot of fun fun like this segue to our sponsor Micro
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might also enjoy Anthony's guide to turning your old PC into a Home Server