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."

Comments

Re:Guess I have to ask

[Anonymous Coward]

They [Apple] didn't understand the concept of group permissions - files copied to a sharepoint had read only group permissions, even if the sharepoint's permissions were defined as group r/w.

Re:...from the oxymoron dept.

[psyconaut]

"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

Re:...from the oxymoron dept.

[chrispy666]

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.

Aqua Lite?

[cloudless.net]

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?

Re:Aqua Lite?

[Hungus]

Just run it headless on my Xserves at Idle I use less than 1% total CPU and thats while monitoring it. the gui only comes up when i log into it as a user ( via ARD or TB2)

Re:Aqua Lite?

[Pathwalker]

If you were using an OSX box as a server, you would probably disable the GUI and run the system with a text console.

You do that by editing /etc/ttys and uncommenting the first of these two lines, while commenting out the second:

#console "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" vt100 on secure

console "/System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Cont ents/MacOS/loginwindow" vt100 on secure window=/System/Library/CoreServices/WindowServer onoption="/usr/libexec/getty std.9600"

(random spacing in the second long line inserted by slashdot's anti-page-widening code)

Re:Windows Domain-like functions?

[kwerle]

It also supports NetInfo which is similar in function to LDAP.

How sad that it is reduced to this. NetInfo is one of the finest resource administrative systems available. It is very unfortunate that it is languishing - mostly unused and un-talked about. (yes, every system uses it by default, but I'd say that most folks on a network don't use/understand it to a fraction of it's potential)

Yes, I'm one of those NeXT zealots :-/

Re:...from the oxymoron dept.

[Llywelyn]

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.

you're thinking too hard

[Petrox]

or you could just type ">console" at the login screen and save yourself from futzing with loginwindow.app.

It must be more complicated than this

[PDubNYC]

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.

Re:...from the oxymoron dept.

[fdobbie]

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.

Re:...from the oxymoron dept.

[TheRaven64]

he current Moto PPC is just too underpowered

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.