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Setting Up A Site Server with Jaguar
rgraham writes "James Duncan Davidson (the original author of Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant) has an article over at O'Reilly's MacDevCenter that walks you through the steps of not only getting Apache up and running on 10.2 (pretty simple, I know) but also DNS and Mail. The aricle goes along well with Alan Graham article on how to setup your own .Mac type service."
lots of code written to run on windows web servers (even the win32 version of apache) needs to be rewritten to run on the production unix server because of locations of libraries, stuff that's not ported, etc... (i guess some of this could be overcame with cygwin, but...)
also in linux you don't get photoshop, or perhaps other commercial tools that most web developers are familiar with. lots of web developers are also stuck with design assignments mixed in with the development, so it's a good idea to have solid graphical tools.
the mac you get both a stable and compatible unix environment, and industry standard graphic design tools.
This is the exact reason why i bought myself an iBook, and I don't regret it a bit.
1. It's not some wonky, secure, stripped, stable *nix box that can't run GUI IDEs.
2. It can give me multicolored colored visual cues to code, so monochrome terminal sessions are out. Colored terminals are OK, but they lack the same elegance of a full GUI.
3. It can quickly deal with running those additional programs I need when reading laughable client 'specs' in PowerPoint, MS word, HTML email from hell, etc.
4. The code, on my GUI-heavy isolated dev box, can run identically to the code deployed on the stripped, burly, boxen.
5. If I need to test speeds without a GUI, I can ignore it, and use the box in a stripped, clean, mode.
6. It must be stable without being cold and wooden (Red flag of personal preference, I find almost all *nix platforms to be far less comfortable than they could potentially be. I know the KDE/Gnome/Solaris folks are working on it, and have their advantages as well)
7. It must support additional "development necessary tools" such as playing mp3's, accounting for my time with professional accounting software, play mpg's, and run the occasional "break tool" in the form of some game that isn't 5 (or more) years old.
8. It must support running javascript, and be able to test IE, NN, *and* lynx, and be able to run MacOS 9, MacOS X, X windows (and sub-managers), as well as MS windows (and their many variants).
9. The hardware and software should need my personal intervention for tweaking and updates, well, almost never. I am not paid to update my box, I am paid for writing original code.
I run a business, and I use (deep breath) LinuxPPC, Yellow Dog Linux, SuSe (on X86 and PPC), Debian (on PPC and X86), Mac OSX, RedHatX86 (four versions), OpenBSD (PPC and X86), FreeBSD (X86), SunOS (really, some clients still use it), Solaris (all 'of the flock, ugly), Win 3.1, Win 95, Win 98, Win ME, Win NT 3.x, Win NT 4.x, Win2K, Win XP (all).
Of all of the above OS's, which one, do you think, can actually do requirements 1-9? (There's only one, take your time...) I used to do dev work on no less than 3 different boxes a day to meet those requirements. Now I use one.
Of course, if I have a few sites with a few million hits a day (I do), I'll host it elsewhere than my test box, an OS X box.. But I'm not going to develop on that box. I'm going to develop on a box that makes me the most productive, a box where I don't care about IRQ's, drivers, optimizing window managers, running rpm or apt-get or any other time-wasting CLUI tools that interfere with writing code.
For writing code, use a box that meets *your* needs. All platforms prior to OS X meant I was using far too many comps, because I needed multi-platform, multi-client-platform, code. No other platform allows you to test as many platforms at once as PPC/OS 9/OSX on Mac.
-Bop
You wouldn't necessarily buy a new Mac to use as server. But since the entire Mac world is being migrated to a platform that installs Apache, etc., someone has decided to write a piece explaining how to take advantage of that fact. What's your problem with that?
As for price, I would have paid just as much for a PC as I did for this Mac. All the PC would have given me was the need to install Linux and spend hours tweaking the thing so I could stand to look at it. My time is more important to me than the money, so I went the Mac route.
Why does a "community" that whines so much about "choice" and "freedom" have such a hissy fit every time someone says something positive or useful about a competing platform? Any chance that's because you want to limit choice and freedom to only one kind of software?
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
I cannot believe he didn't even mention turning on your firewall (which is so simple in OS X, since a GUI interface to the ipfw software that has always been there is now available right in System Preferences). It is very irresponsible to tell people to set up a server without telling them how to protect it. Come on. (I use BrickHouse instead of Apple's interface, but they both provide a GUI interface to ipfw, so it's pretty similar, just more full-featured.) Also, the author does not mention alternatives to Sendmail. Many people consider Postfix to be superior. See Installing Postfix and UW IMAP on MacOS X Server for instructions on setting it up for OS X.