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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.
"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)"
;-)
I wouldn't exactly say it was "hacked on" and it's certainly not *worse* at comparible clock speeds to the Motorola implementation.
Maybe you can point us to some references?
Also, you don't think renderfarms benefit from Altivec? I know at least a few firms using small clusters of Xserves for rendering.
Yes, the current crop of Motorola processors are definitely lackluster, but let's keep our eyes on the road kids
-psy
Well, no it isn't a server architecture presently, but who's to say it couldn't be in the future? I'd personally like to see this work out for them. In theory, the processor will be plenty powerful for it. Who cares if they hacked on Altivec? I doubt anyone will argue that the Power architecture isn't powerful enough to be used in server applications, and Apple can certainly make administration painless and easy enough if they want to. I say give 'em a chance!
I tend to disagree.
OSX server has its place on the market. Some people simply don't want to hire a whole IT dept. just to get a mail server or filesharing. In this case, since the server will be operated by non-unix-gurus, it has too look friendly to administer too. there you have it, OSX server.
Plus, those blinking lights are simply coooooooool.
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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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A couple of years ago I was hired to put together an LDAP server for a major university. It had to hold student records, give them the option to change them, and do a few other nice things along these lines.
We used RedHat Linux in a Penguin Computing Rackmount, it is ashame one of these things was not available then.
It didn't need to have a 1337 processor(s), it needed to never crash and have protection and backups in case it did. It didn't need a fast hard drive, it did need to be easy to configure and nearly brainless to maintain or use.
This would have been perfect for that task.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
or you could just type ">console" at the login screen and save yourself from futzing with loginwindow.app.
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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.
Actually, I heard that one WebObjects developer's Sun servers were up for renewal, so they replaced 3 mid-spec SPARCs with one xserve and got a massive performance INCREASE.
Darwin (FreeBSD + Mach Kernel) is Open Source. (APSL) The window manager is not. (NextStep framework) Any questions?
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Maybe. I suspect that this is true for large sites (well, except iTMS, which I hear works just fine on a bunch of X-Servers). For most small buisnesses, however, modern CPUs are overpowered. Our current server is a 750HMz Duron with 256MB of RAM. It handles email (SMPT, POP3, IMAP and webmail), about a hundred individual web sites (not very high traffic, about 15000 requests per day average), Jabber (public server, listed on the jabber.org site), a web-cam and a few other things. Its load average sits at under 0.20. In fact I'm running top on it right now, and the most CPU-intensive thing it's doing is running top. We stopped upgrading it a while back and diverted the funds to new workstations.
you can run it on an AMD or whatever for half the price.
For a small buisness the additional cost of an X-Server over an Intel/AMD Linux/*BSD server is minute compared to the amount that they can save by not employing someone fulltime to maintain it.
The OS is not designed to be a server, it's designed to be a personal use OS.
A lot of the kernel is from FreeBSD which is very much a server OS. The rest is designed to increase usability. Linux (and *BSD for that matter) are not friendly for people with no *NIX experience (well, they might be on a desktop where you can hide behind gnome or KDE, but not on a server). An X-Serve could quite easily be run in-house by a company which already has Mac-experienced employees, and a company that is not a 'computer company' is much more likely to have Mac people in house than *NIX people.
Of course I wouldn't recommend using an X-Serve for hosting a site like /., but for a SME that out-sources all of its IT support it would be a cost-effective solution.
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"the server will be operated by non-unix-gurus"
Follow that to its conclusion: if it does the same job (with the same reliability, security, features, etc.), and does not need to be operated by unix gurus, does it even matter if it is Unix? No. Unix is great mostly because of the years and years of solid implementation (much of which is due to "openness", e.g. open source), I don't think it has much to do with design (as you can witness by modern features having to be bolted on).
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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.
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