I have an old Mac Pro with 2 x CPUs each having 24 GB RAM, space for 4 HDDs. For reasons of economy I would like to use this as the basis of a media server, primarily videos and music ripped from optical disc. This is so I can move into a retirement village (which may become necessary sooner than I would like) without having to dispose of my collections. My computer skills have somewhat faded since I was doing customer support on SUN Unix. These days I mostly use Linux for email and browsing. However it seems to me that FreeBSD is a much better choice for long term stability.
Question 1: The Mac wants to boot to MacOS, and to get to another operating system it seems that I have to do a series of specific keystrokes to start my chosen system. Does anyone know of a way to defeat this and simply have a power on startup leading to a login prompt?
Question 2: I figure on getting the biggest four hard drives I can afford. Then I would like to store the files (typically ISO images for video or WAV or MP3 for audio) in such a way that there is significant protection against bit rot; that is, errors creeping in to the files over time. When I research this topic it appears that ZFS is the file system formatting of choice, but implementing suitable protections against file loss or corruption is an area I am ignorant in. Any pointers or directions to good practise would be most helpful here.
Thank you for any assistance that you can provide, Arthur Wellesley.
Question 1: The Mac wants to boot to MacOS, and to get to another operating system it seems that I have to do a series of specific keystrokes to start my chosen system. Does anyone know of a way to defeat this and simply have a power on startup leading to a login prompt?
Question 2: I figure on getting the biggest four hard drives I can afford. Then I would like to store the files (typically ISO images for video or WAV or MP3 for audio) in such a way that there is significant protection against bit rot; that is, errors creeping in to the files over time. When I research this topic it appears that ZFS is the file system formatting of choice, but implementing suitable protections against file loss or corruption is an area I am ignorant in. Any pointers or directions to good practise would be most helpful here.
Thank you for any assistance that you can provide, Arthur Wellesley.