Slashdot Mirror

Like this?

A kit that does exactly that would be great, like the Marathon kits, like the iRack. Sure, it's warranty-violating activity, but when has that stopped anybody?

If anyone at Marathon is listening, I'd buy a rack kit in 2 seconds. Include a power supply to install in the iMac case and power the LCD, plus add a DVI port, and you end up with a great rackmounted Mac and a nice display to use on some other Mac.

I wonder if I can order all the parts except the case and LCD, and get the computer cheaper that way. Probably not.

Actually Marathon Computing made a rackmount case which you could stuff with the innards of an iMac and called it iRack.

We've got one at work, running 10.2 Server and it does fine as an accounting and file server.

Here's what you're looking for. It's an arm that clamps onto the desk that can hold a Cinema Display.

The link to the show (http://www.macradio.com/tuesday) is dead, and there's no e-mail link on the referring page. My question: what makes anyone think there's an untapped market for such a thing, when Marathon Computer is closing out a very similar creature as what appears to be a loss? For those with an iMac DV (and a spare monitor lying around), a $300 replacement case seems to be a preferable option to a new Apple analog board, but that's about the entire anticipated customer base, right?

The spare parts probably don't come directly from Apple.

I know a guy in a small town in Texas who buys literally tons of used Macs, at least a hundred G3 iMacs a week from schools, businesses and government auctions, plus as many from eBay as he needs. He refurbishes the good ones, breaks down the bad ones for parts, and sells them for a tidy profit, but at much lower prices than Apple.

His operation is huge, so it would not surprise me if this guy were to transplant PowerMac or iMac guts into modded PC cases, or sell his parts to those who do. Because he buys his Macs used, he's not under any obligation to Apple at all, so long as he doesn't sell the OS or any other Apple software with the transplant. ROMs aren't the problem they used to be.

Also, this wouldn't be the first time something like this was attempted. For example, the iRac mounts iMac guts in a rack.

For those musicians and recording folks who use Apples (like me), this would be a perfect excuse to try an Xserve. A 1.33GHz single-proc with a gig of memory and 2 60GB ATA drives would come to $3574, with the ATI video card and two free PCI slots for inserting digital audio cards.

A little pricey, perhaps, but it would make one heck of a core for a digital recording studio, especially if you paired it with one of their RAID arrays for storing digital audio.

For those less-expensively-inclined, a dual-1.42 GHz G4 Desktop with a 120GB drive and a gig of memory would run you $2949, and you can buy a rackmount kit for it from Marathon Computer for around $200...

If the only thing wrong is the monitor, and you're willing to invest a bit, then just buy the iRack (watch out though, the US might try to DDoS it...), and put it in your rack in the closet...

Or rip out it's guts, copy the iRack's install guide, and install all the parts on a piece of plywood...

Or, as another poster said, rip out the drive, install VNC, then put the drive back in...

Also, I know that thay there is something that looks suspiciously like a VGA port and does connect suspiciously near the monitor on the motherboard of my Rev A iMac...

Or you could buy the iPort from Griffin Technology that adds a serial port and video out to your Rev A or Rev B iMac for only $60...

Or, as a last dich effort, you could rip out the guts, and make an aquarium....

Or you could send it to me, I'm in the Boston area and would love an old iMac to do the above with... ;)

Seriously, there are so many posibilities. I'm sure with the above you can make the iMac a nice file server. Or whatever.

Orange

If the only thing wrong is the monitor, and you're willing to invest a bit, then just buy the iRack (watch out though, the US might try to DDoS it...), and put it in your rack in the closet...

Or rip out it's guts, copy the iRack's install guide, and install all the parts on a piece of plywood...

Or, as another poster said, rip out the drive, install VNC, then put the drive back in...

Also, I know that thay there is something that looks suspiciously like a VGA port and does connect suspiciously near the monitor on the motherboard of my Rev A iMac...

Or you could buy the iPort from Griffin Technology that adds a serial port and video out to your Rev A or Rev B iMac for only $60...

Or, as a last dich effort, you could rip out the guts, and make an aquarium....

Or you could send it to me, I'm in the Boston area and would love an old iMac to do the above with... ;)

Seriously, there are so many posibilities. I'm sure with the above you can make the iMac a nice file server. Or whatever.

Orange

I've got an rev. b iMac (the almost-original bondi blue style) with a dead monitor. As near as I can tell the electronics are all fine, but without a working display it won't boot. I'd love to get it running again, minimallly as a "hidden in the closet" server, or better still by finding someone with another dead iMac with a working display where I could merge the parts together into one working machine.

But since just fixing it doesn't seem feasible (a new CRT has been quoted to me for around $500, so that's not an option), and I haven't been able to find anyone for the "franken-mac" idea, my fiance has been trying to get me to throw it away instead, and sooner or later I'm sure she'll have her way on this one.

Plus the empty case would make a nice macquarium

Do a bit of research before posting next time. Run over to pricewatch and do a bit of comparison shopping. Ohhh! whats that? 1U rack mount PC cases START at $250 and the nice one's cost around $300.

Or you could just buy this for $1499.

What's involved in rackmounting Mac hardware? Any real world, prior experience advice out there?

If you look at almost any CD/DVD-ROM drive built recently, you will notice on the tray that there are several different ways that will hold the disc in place. The two most common that I have seen are little tabs that pop out to hold the disc, or a little lip (similiar to a Playstation 2 drive) that "cradles" the disc.

Scroll down on this page for a variety of different ways that discs will run sideways.

3rd party rack-mounted cases are already out there - from Marathon or GVS. Given how important style is to Apple at the moment, I doubt they're going to branch out into purely functional cases anytime soon...

-dair

However, it would be possible to have a decent-looking (ie non-wacko), slimline design differentiated from Apple's normal consumer kit. This might be a niche market, but that is usually where Apple thrives.

Once you have released the computer from its fruity prison, you can then give it a proper rectangular computer case with the iRack
1U rack mount box. Sadly, it only handles rev A through D, so you will get topped out at 333MHz, still for many network applications thats way too much CPU anyway.

I'm still hoping Apple will make G3/G4 computers in a form factor similar to briq. Something I can cram in 3 or 4 to the U. As long as I'm dreaming, no video hardware, just Quartz over ethernet and a discovery protocol that lets me connect by MAC address from my management station.

Granted I haven't really been looking, but I've never seen any sort of PPC setup that can go in a rack.

They exist, by 3rd parties. Here is one manufacturer, that has rack-mounted imacs, g3's, g4's, even linux clusters using mac hardware.

Marathon Computer



Then again, don't the new G4s all come with gig Ethernet? I really wonder what the purpose of throwing that in was.

Man, I can't tell if you're a troll or what... but yeah, the tower g4's all come with gigabit ethernet. This isn't rocket science. If you are uploading text scripts on the network, a 10mbit ethernet connection is fine. Even if you get 30 guys all doing that once in a coding department, no big deal.

But most graphic design shops now work off the server, in that the files are on the server that you'll be working on... you either download them and then upload them back when you are done, or many actually want you to work off of the files on the server.

If you are working with 100meg photoshop files, or even 20 meg photoshop files, and 10 people are trying to hit the server at once, it sucks and is slow. So alot of print companies were having to install gigabyte cards right away.

No big deal right? Well the big media markets were already a little annoyed that they no longer had their 9600 models with 6 pci slots (only 3 in the g3-g4) and to have to automatically fill one up with a gigabit card, plus a second monitor card... slots were scarce.

It was a cool move by apple, and really pushed gigabit switches/hubs along.

See Marathon Computer. They have a pretty wide range of rack-a-Mac equipment.

-Mark

Check out the iRack, by Marathon Computer. It allows you to rack mount an iMac in 1U of space, sans monitor of course.

Only problem is, it costs $400 and does not include the guts of the iMac-- you provide those.

~Philly

It looks to me like these are nothing but iMacs re-packeged into Marathon Computer's iRack.

Check out the picture on the terrasoft page, and then look at the marathon page. They look almost identical!!

That would explain the RAM limitations, and the lack of SCSI.

Kind of dissapointing that they are just repackaging Apple hardware!!

Following a link from a previous Slashdot story about somebody rack-mounting an iMac, I came to this site. Looks a whole lot like that terrasoft unit, to me.

At $400 for the case and another $900 for an iMac to go in it, that puts you $500 under the per-unit price of the terrasoft cluster. This is assuming, of course, that you can actually get one of these cases now and that it's worth your time and effort to put the thing together and get it running yourself.

Which it may be to me. ;)

Not until Apple ships a dual capable mobo with integrated 100 bit or 1000 bit ethernet and integrated video, so that either they or someone else can slap them into 1U enclosures

Apple's current G4 motherboards are all dual-processor capable, and the G4's also include Gigabit ethernet now, and thier older motherboards (Beige G3) also included integrated video.

Re:Will this catch on in the web hosting community (Score:1) by um... Lucas (lk@caralis.com) on Friday November 03, @09:33AM PDT (#176) (User #13147 Info) http://www.dioxidized.com/ Not until Apple ships a dual capable mobo with integrated 100 bit or 1000 bit ethernet and integrated video, so that either they or someone else can slap them into 1U enclosures. Because right now, you can fit 13 or 14 cobalt raq's into the space required by 3 or 4 G4's. So it's not really a winning proposition that way. At some point a while back, some outfit was shipping 1U enclosures for iMac motherboards,

I believe that outfit was Marathon Computers. They also will mount your B&W G3/G4 into a 4U rack (that's still pretty big).

Oh balls. You can get a rack & replacement handles from Marathon. They're an Apple authorized VAR, and even make rackmount units. And now that there's the G4 Cube.... egads, man. That thing was made to be clustered!!! Pop out the innards, pop it in a rack enclosure. Unit goes bad? Pop it out and pop in a replacement. Even has a built-in handle. Gives a whole new definition to the phrase "Cube Farm".
---

(I can't even fit the damn things in my rack mount!)

Actually, you can. http://www.marathoncomputer.com/pr_grack.html