SERVER FOR CLASSROOM MEDIA HELP?!

[destroyfish]

I have a computer lab full of iMacs, all in terrible condition. They are decades old and their harddrives are near the end of their lives. Ordering new computers are out of the question as it takes forever to be quoted, approved, and purchased. I have only two systems I can work with, a z800 Workstation and an older edition Mac Pro tower. I propose this question as almost like an interesting puzzle, what would you do with this hardware if this was ALL you had to work with?

 

What we need

A place for students to drop off their footage and access their footage, allowing them to copy and drop off seemlessly.

A secondary server to run modded minecraft (we use this for our coding lessons and class activities, minimum ram requirement 16GB.

 

Your Hardware

1x 320GB 2.5 HDD

2x 500GB 2.5 HDD

2x 500GB 3.5 HDD

1x 1TB 3.5 HDD

1x 320GB 3.5HDD

Mac Pro Tower (32GB DDR2 RAM Dual Intel Xeon [that's all it says])

Z800 Workstation (32GB DDR2 RAM Dual Intel Xeon x5650)

 

My Concerns

I don't know how to truenas a Mac Pro, so that leaves the z800 but I'm having some trouble installing it. I researched how to media share between Mac, but I'm not sure how many can transfer and access those harddrives at the same time. What would you do with this set up?

 

Seriously this is all I have and I can't order or spend any of my own funds. We make do with what we have.

 

[BiotechBen]

11 minutes ago, destroyfish said:

I have a computer lab full of iMacs, all in terrible condition. They are decades old and their harddrives are near the end of their lives. Ordering new computers are out of the question as it takes forever to be quoted, approved, and purchased. I have only two systems I can work with, a z800 Workstation and an older edition Mac Pro tower. I propose this question as almost like an interesting puzzle, what would you do with this hardware if this was ALL you had to work with?

 

What we need

A place for students to drop off their footage and access their footage, allowing them to copy and drop off seemlessly.

A secondary server to run modded minecraft (we use this for our coding lessons and class activities, minimum ram requirement 16GB.

 

Your Hardware

1x 320GB 2.5 HDD

2x 500GB 2.5 HDD

2x 500GB 3.5 HDD

1x 1TB 3.5 HDD

1x 320GB 3.5HDD

Mac Pro Tower (32GB DDR2 RAM Dual Intel Xeon [that's all it says])

Z800 Workstation (32GB DDR2 RAM Dual Intel Xeon x5650)

 

My Concerns

I don't know how to truenas a Mac Pro, so that leaves the z800 but I'm having some trouble installing it. I researched how to media share between Mac, but I'm not sure how many can transfer and access those harddrives at the same time. What would you do with this set up?

 

Seriously this is all I have and I can't order or spend any of my own funds. We make do with what we have.

 

Would really depend on how many terminals are needed at one time.

In grade school our district set up partitioned file share for each student on the server and individual media was password protected (H drive) and then a general file share that was not individually password protected(G drive). A system like that could work for you with having 1 or 2 mac's as basically a terminal for access to the file server (shouldn't be too demanding as long as everyone isn't trying to copy and edit files at the same time). And then the Minecraft server could be basically a VM on the file server perhaps? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 hours ago, destroyfish said:

x 320GB 2.5 HDD

2x 500GB 2.5 HDD

The annoying part with these drives is they won't fit natively in either computer, so you either using tape, buying an adapter or not using them.

 

2 hours ago, destroyfish said:

Z800 Workstation (32GB DDR2 RAM Dual Intel Xeon x5650)

 

Id probably just do it all on here, faster cpu and just overall nicer system to work with(those mac pros are limited to 10.11, so mac os isn't a option, and its just a bit more of a pain to use other oses.)

 

Id put a hypervisor like porxmox on the host. Make a vm for minecraft, and for filesharing.

 

Id use the 2 500gb hdds in a mirror for boot, and then store videos on the 1tb hdd and hope it doesn't die.