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Apple Will Demo Mac OS X Server At WWDC
epec254 writes "According to MacCentral the next new version of Mac OS X Server, based on Panther, will be previewed at the WWDC session 'Apple Solutions in Enterprise.' Maybe they will get file permissions right this time."
What was wrong with file permissions under previous versions?
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
Seriously. I'm as big a Mac fan as the next guy, but the Mac is just not a server computer. Maybe if there're 970s at this WWDC that'll change a bit, but the current Moto PPC is just too underpowered, and its FSB is just too slow to be competitive. You can get more racks, but the dang things cost too much to be price-competitive.
The best thing about the PPC is its vector unit, and that's not all that useful on a server (POWER architecture doesn't even have it; it had to be hacked on in the 970, and is worse in some ways than the MOTO Altivec). You could use it to speed up your crypto, but it's really a bigger help with RC5 than say RC4 for obvious reasons, and doesn't give that much an advantage for AES or 3DES or just about any other code. Not unless they add a GF(2^32) vector multiply or something crazy to keep those weird benches up. I suppose it could be useful with RSA or DH, but that could take a good deal of assembly to optimize.
And you can run apache httpd on them (I run it on my eMac). Big whoop, you can run it on an AMD or whatever for half the price.
The OS is not designed to be a server, it's designed to be a personal use OS. Really, Apple will not do well in that market without major IBM help.
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Will Apple make a faster, simplified version of Aqua for the server? The current Mac OSX GUI seems very resource hungry. In Windows Server 2003, themes and many visual effects are disabled by default. Will Apple do the same for Mac OSX server?
I admit I haven't played around with OS X Server at all. Does it have a package of functions compareable to a windows domain? Like centralized user resources/authentification, GPO's, etc.? Or am I thinking outside of the scope of what it was intented to do? If I am, what is it inteneded to do then, just be a simple file/printer share server, web hosting?
Just curious.
I run a 10.2.7 Server for my email, FTP, etcetera. It's an old Blue and White G3 400, and it's plenty fast for me for everything I've done. And the GUI doesn't eat up cycles when the machine isn't being used hands on. I can ssh in and run top, and the Windows Server is only around 1%, even though it's plugged into a monitor, with a pre Quartz Extreme video card.
I really like the Mac server. Easy to administrate, with all the UNIX goodness lying just under the surface. And while I'm a generally technical guy, I'm certaily not an admin by nature.
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or you could just type ">console" at the login screen and save yourself from futzing with loginwindow.app.
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You're misrepresenting the situation.
The default umask was the problem.
You could override this, but doing this on all your clients may not have been practical.
i don't read slashdot anymore.
You've got it round the wrong way. User authentication info is still stored in a NetInfo database, it just available either via NetInfo domains, or via LDAP. geddit?
i don't read slashdot anymore.
I may not be the smartest man, but to make a statement along the lines of "Apple didn't understand the concept of permissions" seems a tad simplified, arrogant, and wrong. I have to believe that they had a very good grasp of what they were doing, but perhaps ran into problems in the implementation. Not trying to be a dick, but I think you have to believe that the engineers working on OS X understand the concept of permissions, even if they ran into a problem with them. I am sure they are under tremendous pressure to get things out the door. That said, the problem you mentioned was a huge one, and I look forward to the continued improvement of OS X, client and server, even as I pray for a new hardware architecture based on the "G5" or whatever.
Darwin (FreeBSD + Mach Kernel) is Open Source. (APSL) The window manager is not. (NextStep framework) Any questions?
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
Will Apple make a faster, simplified version of Aqua for the workstation? The current Mac OSX GUI seems very resource hungry.
May we never see th
am i the only one that thinks it is odd that all the recent apple news is ripped right off the typical mac rumor sites?
i didnt know slashdot was breaking in to the apple rumor market. i mean i know there are a fair number of rumors in other sections of slashdot too, but lets face it, anyone interested in mac rumors went to those mac rumor sites long before they were posted here.
go team!
AppleMailServer still sucks. I hope they stick a GUI on Postfix/courier or something. ;)
Our OS X Server here got Postfix & Courier-IMAP installed right out of the box. Much easier to add SpamAssassin/procmail/etc and I don't have to deal with the AppleMail Server big-phat-file way of doing things.
what you are saying is that you know better than all of the engineers at Apple? Don't get me wrong, I think it sucks when something gets released that is not working properly. And if you want to write me off as some Mac-zealot, I couldn't care less. But the reality is that the people producing these products are individuals just like you and me, and I would like to think that they have some kind of pride in their work, not to mention the skills necessary to get the job in the first place, that would make them want to do the best job that they can.
Sorry I can't be as cynical about this as you are. I know damn well that Apple is a corporation that is there to make money, not worry about me. But I am looking at it, however naively, at an individual level, and trying to put myself in the employees shoes, where I have been. Sometimes your company doesn't give you the time or perhaps the resources to do things that you know need to be done. I was simply responding to someone who was talking like they know so much more than the engineers at Apple. whatever.
I think I hear your mom calling down to you in the basement. Breakfast is ready. She made waffles.
Yeah, I've set up a server on my OS9 box at home, but it wasn't that reliable, nor fast, and I sorely missed SSH. I also made one on my OSX box at college, and it was great. I upgraded the preinstalled apache with a Fink installation of 2.0.44, and used it to serve all sorts of stuff, forums for class discussion, etc.
I also agree that OSX is a great OS (with the possible exception of the Finder), and almost rock-solid (it did panic a few times on me during high-workload such as rendering, and some other trouble, like kernel deadlocks that made procs unkillable, even by sudo kill -9). Other than, well, basically the Finder, it's easily the best OS I've used for personal computing stuff.
But yes, I'm talking about the hardware. For most serving applications (complete with CGI), the big stats you need (other than network connection) are memory size and speed, HD size speed, and integer unit speed. Memory size is fine, as is HD size and speed on the XServe. Integer speed is not great (better clock for clock, but the clock speed is slow), but probably sufficient for most apps. A plus for the Mac is that the PPC architecture has less expensive context switches than the X86, which could help against a flood of traffic (would be most important if you were DoSed).
However, the memory bus speed is horrendous compared to just about every competing architecture. And given that if your site gets slashdotted or something, you'll be spending most of your time futzing with CGIs, and getting stuff from the buffer cache... memory speed and intop speed are what'll make or break your day.
Now, you are right that for a 1U enclosure, the server isn't that bad in most of its specs. But the dual procs don't entirely make up for the slow bus speed. Further, the system is more expensive than an equivalent X86 system would be. This is really what I meant when I said it was unsuitable: in terms of hardware price/performance, you are generally worse off with the Mac.
However, as some posters pointed out, I was wrong. If you're a small corp, can run on just a few servers, it probably would be cheaper to get XServes, since you'd save on tech support and admin costs that way. If Apple gets their file perms right this time. Also, as I pointed out in my original post, these points could all pretty much be moot, except for cost, if they end up with a 970 or other souped-up IBM chip in them.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
For each sharepoint, you configure it to get either "Unix behaviour", or "Mac behaviour".
Unix behaviour is: file creation according to your umask, and ownership by your primary group.
Mac behaviour is inheritance of the permissions of the enclosing folder. You probably wanted that, but neglected to choose to do so.
Maybe you should get a clue about learning grammar as much as you should get a clue about how THE Mac is not dying.
Anyone that would post a sentence like that one should NOT be lecturing others about grammar.
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