[rescue] Minor success - '09 mac pro

[Bill Bradford]

My now-former manager at work mentioned about a year ago that he was upgrading
from his '09 Mac Pro (cheese grater), to a newer Mac Mini.  I inquired, and
was told that when he gave up the machine, once our Desktop department
sanitized it, I could have it.

Fast forward a year... he switched departments this past Monday, and moved out
of his existing office to another floor.  I caught him at the elevator on
Tuesday and mentioned the system.. later that afternoon, one of the Desktop
guys brought it by my office.  "No drives, though".  "Not a problem, I have a
literal pile of 1T SATAs here".

As of this afternoon, I have:

- Tested it with a 1T HD, works fine.
- Installed ElCapitan off a USB stick without problems.
- Bought a USB wifi dongle as it didn't have an Airport card, got it online
- Ran the firmware update hack that "changes" it from a MacPro4,1 to a 5,1
  (2010), which is compatible with Sierra/High Sierra
- Picked up a couple of 2.5-to-2.5 adapter brackets for some SSDs
- Dug out a couple of Intel 710-series 100G SSDs from my "parts bin"
- Done a bare-metal install of High Sierra (without problems) onto one SSD,
  setup the second for storage, and with the 1T HD as mass storage.

My next goal is to find a Mac-compatible (Apple EFI firmware, so I can 
get boot logo / option screens / etc) video card that's better than the
Nvidia GT120 that came with the box.

My total monetary outlay is about $50 (not counting stuff I already had 
lying around).  Not bad for a couple hours tinkering.  I've now got a 
quad-core Xeon 2.66Ghz box with 16G RAM and SSD storage.

Then today, another coworker mentions that he's got the EIGHT-core version
of the same machine (dual CPU) with at least 16G RAM that he'll sell me for
cheap in a couple of weeks once he replaces it with an Intel NUC... 

I love $ORK's policy of giving away "obsolete" machines to employees.
That's how I got my home backup staging server - an older core2duo Mac
Mini - coworker had gotten it from the last batch of upgrades, and I 
traded him a couple IP cameras for it - then maxed it out with 8G of
RAM, 128G SSD as primary drive, and a 1T SATA drive in the optical bay.

Bill

-- 
Bill Bradford
Houston, Texas USA