I setup a Mac Quadra 800, which was admittedly pretty motley (it's a Q800
logic board housed in an old Q700 case) with it's array of external disks
and SCSI cables, for use as a small file server for about 6 PC's. I loaded a
couple of 1Gb hard disks into an external enclosure, and installed a 250Mb
disk in the internal bay for '/' and '/var' and a final 500Mb external disk
for '/usr'. When the department workstation tech saw it, he asked why I was
wasting time with that 'old crap'. (I work at a University as a research
assistant) Undaunted, I went ahead and compiled Samba 2.0.7, and started
setting up shares.

That was a year and a half ago. The machine has served all that time without
crashing, and without losing data. It just sits in its corner, doing its
thing - day in, day out. I haven't heard a single disparaging remark about
that Mac in a very long time - because it's more reliable than the PC's it
serves. Other than periodic adjustments (like disk upgrades, etc), the
machine has had incredible uptimes. It runs for months on in.

I figured after a year, why not test the machine a bit. So, I loaded up X11.
It runs in 16bit color, and while it's not fast, it's more than fast enough
to manage multiple Xterms (the one area I wish NetBSD would look into is
multiple virtual terminals...) I settled on BlackBox, which is a minimalist
WM, and off I went. Now, I could open my mail in one window, and check out
the system in another. (the machine only has a 13" RGB monitor -> 640x480)

After that success, I bought a copy of DAVE (a SMB/CIFS client for MacOS)
and started using the Q800 as a file server for my Mac development station.
It kept right on rocking, despite the fact I was actually running files, and
working with files, in the share (I kept most of my work on the server so I
could get to it easily from home) I gave the PowerPC to my youngest cousins
as a first computer, but the Q800 is still going strong.

Now, this is a machine that, had I not owned it personally, would have been
scrapped by the university never to be seen again. NetBSD has given it a
*lot* more useful life. Not only has it proved useful, it proved more stable
than the, cough *GASP* department Unix server (choke).

Seth Henry
jshenry@net-noise.com