My powerpc MacMini is retired for many years now. After trying to use it as media server I realized that I did not use it a lot and working with the very old version of MacOS did not make fun. After a long time of being retired I wanted to give the old hardware a new chance. What could this old hardware be useful for?

What about using it as my NAS? Yes sounds great and is much cheaper than a Synology (ok that comparison is not fair, a Synology is much better and for more than two years now I am thinking about buying one because it is an awesome product).

As my OS I chose Debian. After installing the PowerPc version with Xfce I needed to activate ssh:

# let's do this as root
su
apt-get update

# install sudo and add your user to this group
apt-get install sudo
adduser USERNAME sudo

# install ssh server
apt-get install open-ssh-server

Now I need login without password. I like the tool ssh-copy-id (which is part of the openssh-client package):

ssh-copy-id USERNAME@HOST

(if you have more than one key you can choose the key with the -i option)

To make connecting a little bit more comfortable I added an alias to my .zshrc:

alias sshserver='USERNAME@HOST'

and reloaded with

source .zshrc

Now my ssh connection works fine with

sshserver

To test WakeOnLan I needed the MacAdress:

ifconfig -a