# Apple used to make REAL servers

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Jeff Geerling
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFnvZ4NWr00
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/23060

## Транскрипт

### Segment 1 (00:00 - 05:00) []

This year, Apple teased their secret AC/DC servers. That stands for Apple chips and data centers, but that's just a code name. They're building these things in Texas to run private cloud compute. But chances are you and me will never get to see one, much less run it in our racks. But Apple used to sell their servers, not just Macs with rack mounts, but actual rack mount servers like this. These things were nice in their own way. This is the XServe G5, and this is the first time I've ever gotten to touch one. I want to see how it runs, whether it still has any use, and most importantly, why they cancelled these things. And yes, for all you vintage Mac nerds, I know there are workg groupoup servers and rebadged Power PC servers from before the XServe, but this video is just about the rack mount servers, not this behemoth. 65 Scribe has about the best video on the internet about that monstrosity. My XServe was provided by a friend of the channel, and it has dual 2 GHz G5 processors, 3 GB of RAM, and three empty hard drive bays. But before I can test it, I have to get it to boot. And right now, it doesn't. I think I know why. And it's not just the empty hard drive bay. But I'm going to need some tools to fix it. That's why I came to MicroEnter where they have every tool I need for this repair. They're sponsoring my Merchant videos, and it's a good thing because today I really need some soldering tools. What's cool is they have a huge selection. I'm going to pick up this classic HO soldering station to repair the power supply along with some iFixit tools. Honestly, this aisle is my favorite. You could start a repair shop with all the stuff that they have. Click on the link in the description to see all MicroEnter's latest deals. And if you're in Austin, Texas, get ready for a grand opening later this year. Now that I have all the stuff unboxed, I'm realizing this iFixit mat is a lot smaller than I imagined based on the picture. So, that's not going to work. Though, this uh the magnetic feature is kind of cool. Has this little pencil or pen or whatever, and you can draw things on it. So, that was a neat idea, but it's I think this is made for like phones. So, I'm not going to use that. Luckily, I have this side panel from an old Mac Pro that I can use instead here. Now, without even powering on the server myself, why do I think it's the power supply that's the problem? Well, because it was built right in the middle of the capacitor plague. And 99% of the time, bad caps cause these things to fail. So, before we can see this thing in all its glory in my rack, we're going to need to do a little surgery using the tools I got from MicroEnter. And uh first of all, the House of Moth has this awesome guide for these power supplies. Mine is actually a revision zero, and the revisions that he used on here are 01 and O2, but the process should be pretty much the same. He also has a nice print out here with all the locations of the caps which hopefully will be identical on here and all the cap values so that I don't have to do that documentation myself which can be annoying and tedious but uh it's a lot easier when you have somebody else do the list for Now, if you've never taken apart a power supply, this is the part where you might want to be a little extra careful. I know that this is a newer power supply, so it has it likely has bleeder resistors that take the power out of these giant capacitors that are under here uh when it's powered off. But a lot of power supplies don't have that and you could get a wonderful nasty surprise if you touch certain contacts on the bottom here. You can also triple check things using a multimeter on different points on the board uh where capacitors are to make sure there's not a voltage there. One other annoyance with some of these things is this white goop in here. I think it's called scholastic or salastic. This stuff uh holds things in place, especially if they're in motion a lot, if there's a lot of vibration, which there can be in servers. Um, but it's really annoying because you got to remove it to get these things out a lot of times. Some of them, like these two capacitors, will probably come out together, but they're also glued to that guy. So, I'm going to need to cut that away. Uh, or maybe figure out some other ways to get it out of there. Uh, using knives and little poking and proddding without harming the stuff around them. So, that's always fun. Uh, and I will need to take off this guy as well. Working on a metal surface is probably not the best idea. Uh, but this is enough. shockproof insulation. Right, there's some thermal paste on here and it has oozed out the side as well. And

### Segment 2 (05:00 - 10:00) [5:00]

I'll try to remember to put new thermal paste on here before I put it back together. We'll see if I remember. Look at this. Look at this capacitor. So, at this point, I've marked all the locations of the capacitors using a marker. And some of these are a little bit interesting. They're right in the mix with other stuff. So, we're going to see if I can get my desoldering gun in here. Uh, this is a HO F FR301. And MicroEnter does sell this. I actually had this, so I didn't get another one at MicroEnter because that would be silly. Um, but this thing heats up the tip very hot and also has a vacuum pump inside and will suck the solder out. You don't have to have one of these to do this repair, but it makes it a lot easier because it does two things at the same time. It heats up the joint and pulls the solder out. So, we'll see how far we get along with this. Since this is a newer board, I'm hoping that this will just work without any extra steps, but I might need to flow fresh solder in some of the joints. We'll see. Well, getting all these caps out was a little bit of an adventure. Some of the pads are in areas that have either a lot of little SMD components, which makes it kind of annoying to get this guy in there. So, I kind of had to wick out some solder and then actually put in some extra solder and then suck it all out with this. Uh, one interesting thing that I found with this is if you have uh an area of the board that takes a lot of heat, like with one of these giant uh copper planes for a trace, you actually kind of need to leave it on there for a little bit extra to make sure it melts all the way down through the component and then suck it out. If you don't do that, you'll leave some solder in there. Uh, or the other end of the component will get stuck and then you end up ripping out some of the uh feet on these things. So anyway, uh at this point I need to put the new capacitors in. And I'm going to refer to this handy map from the house of moth. After my last video, a few people were asking about uh what this stuff is. This is Amenda little IPA alcohol dispenser. I guess it can do other things besides alcohol, but you push down on the top and it squirts out a little bit of alcohol uh so that you can grab it with a Q-tip or a brush or wet wipe or whatever you want. And it has a nice little lid on it. And this is ESD safe, the blue one. It's a little more expensive, but uh it's a very nice little container. Uh when I worked at a radio station, we had these everywhere, and they were very handy because they don't spill, and you can kind of close the lid and keep a little bit in there. if you need to. Uh they do spill if you tilt them over like I just did here. But anyway, that's that. Uh and I'll leave a link to it if I remember. Otherwise, uh the other thing that a bunch of people mentioned was to get the uh flux off of here, I should get some of these Kim wipes. So, I bought some these are like lint-free wipes. So, instead of just brushing it around on the board and leaving it in place, use this and it will hopefully gather some of it off. So, we're going to try that and see if this works cuz I do have a bunch of flux on here. So, let's do this. First, I'll get some alcohol on the board. Then, I'm going to take

### Segment 3 (10:00 - 15:00) [10:00]

this wipe. We're going to try to wipe it up with this. Let's see how this does. So, it is gathering some stuff up, so that's good. This still rips on all the little pointy bits. So, it'd be nice if they made a magical substance that didn't do that. And I just realized I didn't clip this one. So, I'll have to clip that. But, uh, that is working a lot better. So, thank you to everybody who suggested these little tips. The best thing about the tech community on YouTube is we always are learning. Well, at least if you're humble enough to know that you don't know everything, you're always learning something new in every project that you take on. Some people don't really care too much about comments and the interaction, but I think that's the part of YouTube that makes it YouTube and not Boring Tube. That actually is working pretty well. So, thanks for that suggestion. I did have one spot on here that I was a little bit uh little bit sketchy. Let's see here. If I flip this over, see, these uh these replacement caps were too large to fit under here. I think it would fit under there if I took that completely off and put it in. it would have fit because it's so close. But I didn't want to smash the cap in there and break it. So, I left these two over here. There is space for another cap here. So, this way these fit within the physical dimensions. So, I don't know if they'll fit within this case. Hopefully, they do. Uh, but now that I have that all done and I've checked my checklist of caps off, I'm good. And hopefully this just goes back together and works. We'll see. All right, the last step before I put this in the server, in case I missed something, I'm going to test it on the bench here. I will plug this power supply in. I don't know if this plug is powered or not, but we'll see momentarily. Uh hopefully this works. I heard a click, so that could be good. And I'm on DC. I'm hearing a wine. I'm getting 12 volts. So, I think that's good. I think that this power supply might work in the server. We'll see. Now, the last step for any project like this is I always like to leave a label on here saying that uh I recapped it and what the date is so that 20 or 30 years in the future, somebody can either blame me or thank me. Okay, there we go. And now it's time to put this back in the server. So, the Xerve comes with these drive trays that have SATA cables. I think this is like SATA 1 or SATA 2. It's a very old standard. So, I don't know if this is going to work, but I'm going to try putting in a SATA 3 SSD that I got from MicroEnter. There's 120 GB uh inland Professional. Typically, uh you know, these older computers, you don't need anything super fast. It's going to be way faster than the hard drives these things came with. Uh, but because this is a 2. 5 inch drive, I'm going to use this 2. 5 to 3. 5 adapter. And of course, Apple being Apple, they made these proprietary drive sleds. Look at this connector on the back. I don't know what that thing is. Uh, even if they were making things somewhat standardized, it's Apple. They're going to do something. All righty. First things first, I also have a replacement. I think this is called a half a battery, 3. 6 volts. I have a pack of these that I can put in here. And uh now we should be getting uh the RTC so it can save its clock. I'm going to put the power supply in. And it looks like we just push this in this way. It kind of bonks against this plastic here. Okay. Well, if you hit it, it works. At

### Segment 4 (15:00 - 20:00) [15:00]

this point, I have the hard drive plugged in. Well, the SSD plugged in. I have this guy on. Get these guys back in here. Everything should work. I have a monitor plugged in. I don't have a keyboard and mouse. I'll go grab one of those. This is not powered on yet. I don't want to turn on power to the cord until I have complete control over it. So, I'm going to plug this in without power and I'm going to use Home Assistant to turn it on. I'm going to turn this on and we'll see what happens. I heard some sounds. This is making a high-pitched noise like coil wine. Nothing's exploded yet. That's good. Got 9. 2 watts of power. And I'm going to press the power button over here and see what happens. Sounds like a server. Not getting any LEDs on the uh drive bay there. So, I hope I didn't break those. Oh, there we go. Both LEDs. This is looking good. Do we have anything on Oh, there's the monitor. Okay, we have no boot drive. So, this is good. Everything seems to be working, which is uh kind of a miracle. I'm going to uh look at this. Oh, wow. 200 watts. It's not booted and doing anything. The fans aren't even at 100%, but it peaked at 200 watts and it's staying there. That's a lot of power for a server that's probably about as powerful as a Raspberry Pi. This was the box that I got with this and it has Mac OS 10 server 10. 3. I also have copies of 10. 2. Um, you can see this was even I guess this was an upgrade from 10. 2 on here. Let's see if we can let's see if this works in this uh CDROM drive or DVD. What is this? It doesn't say if it's a CDROM or DVD ROM. I'm not sure, but it says it's the CW8123C. And uh I can tell it's kind of compressed here. But let's see if this works. Okay, that's in there. Are we going to get a boot? Come on. I hear it. The optical drive works. That's crazy. I love how everything is so stretched out on here. It's probably 640x 480 on this 16x9 monitor, but I have that plugged into the VGA on this card. And yeah, I mean there is heat coming out of here. So there are 200 watts being used in there, that's for sure. But uh we'll let this boot up and we'll get back to it in a minute. But look at this. 20 years later and we have dual G5s working. Booting up Mac OS 10 server 10. 3. This is excellent. It's not even loud. People online are always complaining, "Oh, these things are so loud. " It's like, "Yeah, it's loud compared to a Mac. " But if you're talking servers, this is downright quiet. While it's booting up, I guess I'll check the sound level, too. That's of course with the cover off. It'll probably be a little bit quieter with the cover on, but I'm not going to put the cover on right now because it's such a pain. I just noticed I love how there's like a firewire cable for this front firewire port. They just like plug the firewall cable into the motherboard somewhere and then they plug it in here and then they route it to here. Wonder what the uh insertion loss is with all these plugs. There's the CD. It's spun down. So, let's see if this is booted. There it is. Oh, wow. I don't know if you can see that on the screen, but it's kind of wavy. Got that wonderful VGA vibe. I hope that's not a sign of this card having a problem with the capacitors or something, but that's a future problem. And there's other ways to solve that, too. Did I mention there's a serial port on here? By the way, one of the first Macs that had a serial port since like the 80s. This is used for console access, but I have plans. Yeah, it's still 190 watts pretty much continuously here. I apologize for the flickering, but we're just going to have to live with that. USB is working apparently. And I think we're going to get Mac OS 10 installed on this thing. First, I'm going to try to format that SSD. Hopefully, it recognizes it at least. Let's see. No, it's not there. Oh, no.

### Segment 5 (20:00 - 25:00) [20:00]

Okay, so new challenge. try to find a way to get a hard drive or SSD working in here for boot. Alternatively, I might be able to use that FireWire port to boot. That would be very annoying because I'd have to have an external drive. But we'll see. I mean, I thought it was SATA is SATA, but this, like I said earlier, this might be like SATA 1 or SATA 2 and might be incompatible or I really hope that Apple didn't require like proprietary hard drive firmware for these things cuz that would be absolutely insane. So, the 120 gig, which was a premium, or I forget which kind, didn't work. I'm going to try this Inland Platinum. And I'm not even going to put it in the little case for now. I'm just going to slide it in here cuz I have a feeling I'll be testing a bunch of drives to get one to work. Let's get that in there and uh turn this back on. Now, let's check with a 240 gig open disc utility. Fingers crossed. I don't think this will work. No, look, there it is. Okay. Well, let's erase it and just do extended journal and we'll call it Xerve G5. Erase. Will this work? It looks like it worked. Okay. Well, let's install Mac OS 10 server and uh we'll see if we can get this thing booted up off of there, too. Uh I've had this happen before a few times. Says you can't boot up off of it, but when you just format a hard drive fresh, it does this with like 10. 3 or 10. 2, some of those early Mac OS 10s. So, I'm going to uh reboot the computer by quitting the installer. And we're going to try this again and see if it works. Okay, attempt number two. There we go. — A few moments later. Okay, that finished. Let's see what happens. back in the day when you needed a server key for this thing. Ha. All right. Well, I guess we can plug this thing into our network that you have separate LEDs, like fulls size LEDs for activity and connection on here. That just doesn't seem that efficient. Now, I am going to set up a network time service on here. And that's one of the things that I hope to see if I can do better than other Macs, even more modern Macs, using that serial port. All right, it's configured. Let's reboot the Mac and we'll see if Xserve is running off that hard drive. And there we go. That is very fast coming on the SSD. It's funny. This uh this desktop background is kind of muted. In fact, it looks like everything's like desaturated. I guess that's a way that Apple distinguished the server OS from their desktop OS. But uh let's go into server admin and see if we're getting information about this. There we are. It says that uh web server is running so far. Nothing is uh being served up and I don't see any other major information here. I guess they have system information, 240 gigabytes there, CPU usage and network traffic. That's all you got there. Let's check for updates. This would be so funny if there's actually a network a server update for this. Nope. Network error. Okay. and settings. Got date and time. That is definitely wrong. I guess the next thing is to see if this is actually serving up a web page. So, I'm over at my Mac and I'm going to go to XServe G5. There it is. Okay. So, we are serving up web traffic. So, this is kind of neat. Apple has an XServe server monitor app that lets you list all the servers. I guess this worked with their other servers, too. But I can uh get all the information about this thing. I can even turn on the system identification light. That's kind of cool. Uh pretty fullfeatured little app here. And there is what is that? Enclosure intrusion. So yeah, the enclosure is off right now. So it is saying that is uh not locked in place. So, I'm already running a web

### Segment 6 (25:00 - 28:00) [25:00]

server. It's not getting time from Apple. So, that's something I'll have to check into because I do want to use this for NTP time using the serial port for GPS input. I'm going to see if I can figure that out. If I can, this could be a little time server. Well, not a little time server, but a very big time server, but it could be the most accurate Mac time server in the past 25 years because no other Macs have serial input. So, if I can train the clock on here using a GPS, which you can't do as well using USB on newer Macs, then that could be interesting. I was also given this little guy, which is just a little hex key, but a very fancy Apple one with knurling and everything. And it goes onto this. And look at this. This is a little system lock. It locks all the hard drive trays in place. But what's crazy is the way that it recognizes when it's locked. and not locked. See that? When it's locked, it turns on the LED. It has two little optical sensors here. That seems way overengineered, but I guess if it works, it works. Those might be magnetic sensors, hall effect or something, but I think they're just optical with those two little white boxes. But yeah, complicated. And uh it's a very hefty little locking key there. I'm going to install this in my rack. And I was lucky to get the whole rack mount kit along with the XServe. Otherwise, this would be really hard to do. Since it's a beefy server, I used cage nuts. And in addition to offering the usual blood sacrifice, I also lost yet another cage nut in the depth of my rack rails. The rack mounting for this thing is weird. You have to install the bulky outer enclosure in your rack with a template to keep it square. Then there are these horrible back rail mounts. And then after that's done, you slide the naked server into the enclosure. Later Xerfs went to a more traditional sidemount rail system, but this box is really awkward to install if you're by yourself. Besides that, probably the most routine maintenance would be replacing a failed disc. And those drive sleds do work well. Just like Steve Jobs said back when he launched this thing in 2002, we designed a really nice carriage where you can unplug them. And so just, you know, boom, boom, boom. Really easy. Take one out. Just that's it. very simple. — But because of that proprietary connector, these sleds are more of a liability than something I think CIS admins would remember fondly. I mean, if the G5 this thing were based on had plain SATA connectors, why not the Xerve? The X-erve was different in another important way, too. There wasn't a dazzling launch saying it was going to change the world. Steve Jobs got on stage and used a word I don't think I've ever heard associated with an Apple product. If there's one word uh that I would say describes our entrance into the server market, it is um humble. We know we have a lot to learn. Apple tried building their own idea of what the future would look like for Macs and racks and ultimately that vision failed. There were a lot of reasons for it, but it is interesting to see Apple getting back into the rack mount server game. I just wish that we could still buy them. Until next time, I'm Jeff Gearling.