One day it occurred to me that I should make use of an old Apple G4 tower that’s been collecting dust in a proverbial closet.

I say proverbial since it wasn’t physically in a closet but that sounds better than the truth, which is that it was sitting in a corner of my bedroom covered with crap. That’s proverbial crap, mind you and there wasn’t much dust to speak of since the crap was covering the G4.

I knew I’d find that Skid Row shirt one day.

Another thought was that there must be other people out there who really do have older Macs sitting idle in a closet somewhere lamenting its premature obsolescence, not to mention its absurdly depreciated value.

Moore’s law can be prematurely cruel on older machines, which is a shame since many of them still pack quite a bit of computing power.

So I resurrected my old G4 733 tower and decided to put it to good use by installing Apple’s OS X Server 10.4 (Tiger) to run typical services like web, mail, FTP, DNS, etc.

OS X Server is basically a full blown Unix server that’s married to Apple’s beautiful interface and user experience, which is probably why you bought an Apple in the first place.

Brains, brawn, and beauty to boot, plus almost everything is based on modern open source technologies.

It’s a pretty sweet package, even if it’s not the latest version.

Why Tiger (10.4) and not Leopard (10.5)?

Because my G4 didn’t make the cut for Leopard’s demanding hardware requirements and I’m guessing there are many machines out there that won’t either.

Thus is the premise of this excercise, to run Apple’s previous version of their flagship OS X Server on previous generation hardware which you happen to already own.

One of the greatest strength of OS X Server is its ease of use so that it can readily be deployed without a full time systems administrator or a Unix specialist.

A word of caution…

Before we start, I should mention that I’m not an IT person with any formal training like a network administator or an engineer.

What I do have is web development experience and understanding of setting up servers in a network environment.

My background is actually in fine art and design, which is what I do for a living so you should keep that in mind before asking highly technical questions.

The purpose of this blog is to get feedback and to start discussions on this topic so that it may help others taking on a similar endeavor.

For people with ADD like you and me

Another thing I should mention is that this tutorial will be like a Cliff Notes version of setting up OS X Server 10.4 without going too in depth about the terms and technologies involved. It is generally geared towards home and small office networks for those looking to run services that OS X Server offers.

I will also assume that you have basic understanding of computers and networking terms like what a domain name is, what an ip address is, and how to set up a simple network that one would find in most homes.

If you have multiple computers connected to a router with broadband internet access, you’re probably good to go.

This page has the following sub pages.

• 1) Preparing for Installation
• 2) Install Tiger
• 3) Server Admin & Domains
• 4) DNS & DHCP
• 5) Open Directory
• 6) Workgroup Manager - Accounts & Groups
• 7) Workgroup Manager - Share Points
• 8) OS X Client
• 9) Mail Server
• 10) Mail Client
• 11) Apache Web Server
• 12) FTP Server
• 13) Firewall
• 14) VPN Server
• 15) Print Server
• 16) Quicktime Streaming Server

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