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Review - Mac OS X Server 10.3, Part 1
Sure, I can read. I can go to the Mac OS X Server web site and read all the documentation for things related to "standards-based management," "share printers and files," "n-tier" solutions. Yawn. I know all about this stuff, and I know I can do it already. If I am paying good money for this, it better have value I can't already get for free.
First Things First
Essentially, Mac OS X Server is the same thing as Mac OS X (a.k.a. Client). It's the same core OS, it has the same versioning (10.3.2 as of this writing), it runs the same programs. But Server comes with programs and tools and configurations geared toward being a server, rather than a user's workstation.
Server comes in two flavors: a 10-client version for $500, and an unlimited client version for $1000. The only difference between the two is that the 10-client version limits file and windows sharing to 10 simultaneous clients. You can have any number of users, but only 10 can connect to those services at the same time.
With that money, you also get 90 days of "up-and-running" support covering the software that ships with Server. So if you've read the frelling manual and still can't figure out why the firewall doesn't seem to be working, you can get some help. After 90 days, you can still get help -- including more advanced topics -- but it will cost you from $6,000 to $50,000.
Hardware
The Xserve, Apple's rack-mountable computer, comes with the unlimited client version of Server preinstalled; and really, Server is built with Xserve in mind. Server Monitor, included with Server, displays uptime, temperature, drives, power, network usage, fans, and security of Xserve boxes.
You can configure Xserve boxes automatically with Panther Server preinstalled. Design your configuration on one machine, set up an LDAP server and put it in the DHCP server settings, and add your configuration file to the LDAP server. Turn on the other servers for the first time, and each one will find the DHCP server, find the LDAP server, find the configuration file, and configure itself automatically. You can also put the configuration file on a USB key or somesuch, and the machines will configure themselves that way, too.
My test box is a dual G4/1.25 GHz Power Mac; it performs with nary a hiccup. If I had a large network or many users, I can imagine wanting more power: with a Power Mac or Xserve G5, I'd be able to take advantage of an OS that is optimized for the 64-bit CPU. For me, however, this would result in a depressingly, perpetually, low CPU load.
Initial Security Considerations
Out of the box, assuming no one has set up a rogue DHCP server on your network, Mac OS X Server is mostly secure: only SSH is on by default. As other services are turned on, more security concerns are created, because new security holes may be opened.
For the most part, the default configurations of the various services are secure, but that largely depends on your specific environment. Mac OS X Server is excellent at making advanced server configuration easier, but this ease of use comes with a price: you may be opening yourself up to attack. Mac users are often not used to the idea of making themselves vulnerable just by clicking checkboxes.
This may look like a Mac, and may be easy to use, but it is no substitute for having a real live sysadmin on hand to -- at the very least -- audit the security of the system. It'd be nice if Server included audit tools; I envision UI elements that warn you when you have conflicts, or when you've opened up a hole, or when you've violated predefined security policies. On the other hand, it would be more reliable to have a third-party system to do the audit, on basic principle. But that's so un-Mac-like.
Open
Tom Goguen, Director of Marketing for Mac OS X Server, says that Apple is 100% into using open standards and open source in the core operating system.
Mac OS X Server has always been largely based on open standards, but the Panther incarnation has gone even further. Gone are Apple's proprietary mail systems; they are replaced by postfix, mailman, and cyrus. Mostly gone is NetInfo; it is replaced by LDAP. Rendezvous, also an open system that others can plug into, is a bigger part of Server now: FTP, LPR, and web services are all announced via Rendezvous.
Of course, as always, Server -- just like Client -- is based on FreeBSD (now version 4.8, with some of 5.0 stirred in), and most of the Apple core OS itself is under the Apple Public Source License.
A Case for Case
New to Panther is case sensitivity in HFS+. For many years, Mac OS has used the HFS as its file system, which treated "Foo" and "foo" as the same file. Some years ago, HFS+ was introduced to overcome many of the limitations of HFS, but case sensitivity -- seen more as a usability feature than a limitation -- remained.
But in Unix, this certainly is a limitation for many people. "Makefile" vs. "makefile" and "head" vs. "HEAD" have caused many a headache for Mac OS X/Unix users. But now case sensitivity is a formatting option.
Because case insensitivity is still seen as a usability feature, this feature is not available by default on Client, although you could always connect your drive to a Server to format it. It is also possible, in theory, to format a drive with case sensitivity in Client using various tricks.
Setting it Up
My server is connected to my home network via a 100BaseT switch, to which is also connected a cable modem and an AirPort Extreme base station. My PowerBook G4/867 connects to the network via AirPort or the switch. My wife has an iBook G3/600, and I've got a PowerBook G3/400 in my stereo closet for playing MP3s. The PowerBook doesn't have internal AirPort, and instead is connected to another switch and another Extreme base station, configured to do WDS. I've also got the PS2 connected in there. Everything is running Panther Client (except for the PS2, last I checked).
Looking at the various services offered by Server, I can already see many things I want to set up: file sharing (Apple Filing Protocol, or AFP), DHCP for guests, DNS, FTP, SMTP, printing, and web. I have most of those already set up now, but I wouldn't mind if they were easier to configure and manage.
After surveying my situation, I installed Panther Server and took a look around.
The first thing I wanted to see was what my configuration options were. And lo, there in my Dock were not the expected iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, and the like, but icons that a mouseover revealed to be representative of programs like Workgroup Manager, the aforementioned Server Monitor, and Server Admin.
Workgroup Manager uses a lot of terminology that is completely lost on me, and I am not managing any users, really. My wife doesn't need the file server -- we can exchange files via iChat, or I can copy them to her machine via scp -- and she keeps all her own files on her machine. We won't be using any print quotas. I do use Workgroup Manager to create some basic user accounts for friends, but I don't need any features more advanced than what is in Client.
Server Admin is what I want to sink my greedy little digits into. I opened it up, clicked the "add new server" button, typed in my server name ("Sweeney.local") and password, and started playing.
As I started looking around, I remembered that there was an extra CD in the distribution called Admin Tools. It allows you to install these tools on any Client machine, so you can manage the Server remotely. I want to go hang out in my La-Z-Boy while I configure my server, so I installed the tools on my PowerBook. Nifty.
Server Admin lists each machine and the services available to it, with an icon next to each describing its status. If you select a machine's name, you see several tabs: Overview, Logs, System, Graphs, Update, and Settings. Overview reports the system version, names, and dates. Under Logs, you can view the system log, watchdog log, etc. System reports what network interfaces and volumes are available. Graphs displays CPU and network use in pretty pictures. Update runs Software Update. Settings controls the system names, the date and time and timezone.
This is basic stuff, and each service is laid out in similar fashion. All of them have at least two tabs: Overview and Settings. Most also have a Logs tab. Some have other tabs like Connections, Graphs, Clients, Activity, Accounts, Queues, and Jobs.
The available services are AFP, Application Server, DHCP, DNS, Firewall, FTP, Mail, NAT, NetBoot, NFS, Open Directory, Print, QuickTime Streaming, VPN, Web, and Windows. Somewhat conspicuous in its absence, to me, is MySQL, which is included in Server, but doesn't have an interface in Server Admin.
Server Admin does have its problems. It will crash on occasion, but I see no evidence of my settings being corrupted, or any other lasting ill effects. Some of the lists are not sortable, though they appear to be: for example, the DNS zone listings are not sortable, even though clicking on the column headers indicate otherwise.
Also, it can be slow to update. This is understandable, but annoying. Logs don't refresh immediately, and when you hit reload, the wrong log is selected, instead of the current log being refreshed. When restarting services or viewing logs, I will sometimes use the command line tools, as they are more efficient; it would be nice if Server Admin would display the path to the log you are looking at, so you can easily find and tail it in a shell.
Sharing
Some of these services are available in a minimal form in Client, in Sharing under System Preferences: file sharing, Windows sharing, web, FTP, and printing. In Server, the Sharing preferences are still there, but contain only three items: Remote Login, Apple Remote Desktop, and Remote Apple Events. Remote Login is simple: it allows users to connect with ssh/scp, and can be turned on or off. The other two require, perhaps, a bit more explanation.
Apple Remote Desktop is a way for an admin to control client computers. Previously, the client was distributed only as part of the software package of the same name, but now the client is included with Panther. It is, of course, off by default, and once turned on, each machine must define what users have access to what resources (this can be done via the command line, too). I most commonly use ARD for controlling and viewing the screen of another computer, installing packages, and copying files.
Remote Apple Events has been in Mac OS for many years, since back in version 7-dot-something. It allows controlling "scriptable" Mac applications -- such as with AppleScript -- over the network. It used to run over AppleTalk, but now runs over plain old TCP/IP. Not many people make use of remote Apple events in my experience, but I use them often; for example, I have a Perl script that queries iTunes on a remote box, and sets the current track in iChat.
Windows
I don't use Windows, and therefore can't really test the new Windows integration in Panther Server. But from what I can tell, Apple has added quite a few improvements. Samba has been updated to version 3, and the lists of Unix and Windows users can be united via Directory Services. But I confess to a crippling ignorance and apathy about this small corner of the computing world. Sorry.
To Be Continued
Tomorrow, I'll get into the details of setting up the services I use on my network.
Why not post the whole review at once?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Yawn. I know all about this stuff, and I know I can do it already. If I am paying good money for this, it better have value I can't already get for free. You may be able to do it- but to those who cannot a simpl GUI on top makes a world of difference. Different strokes for different folks- don't buy it.
Tomorrow, I'll get into the details of setting up the services I use on my network.
iCan't wait for more of this.
the point of it the same of any company; to make money. Duh, imagine that, apple trying to profit!
No matter how many versions they come out with between Windows, there's always new additions that make this server OS something you have to go out and get.
More info.
Actually that would mean that Apple is charging per connection, not per user. So if you have 100 users a 10-user license would work as long as your users can be limited to 10 at a time. So lo-and-behold they didn't succumb to what you're asserting.
As if this annoying feature was strictly limited to Windows server software...
Now if you had said "commercial server software", that would've much more sense.
That's right.. the Mac has been dying for 20 years now. Another 10 should just about wrap it up..
Trolling is a art,
I'd like to see your setup.
I'm getting an Xserve G5 soon and I haven't used OS X Server at all. Tell us about Netbooting. The idea intrigues me...I must know more about it.
What other things are fun to use with it? The Xserve will be running PHP/MySQL, I don't know much about Mac OS X Server so please let me know!
I ffropgaermgaeromgaegoSRAGKWgaer/.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
This has always been their pricing scheme. It's assumed that if you need more than 10 concurrent connections, the $500 difference is negligible, and you just go for the $1000 unlimited client version. Which is still _much_ cheaper than MS server licensing. Think of the $500 as a cheap version for small businesses or students.
Sure, I can read. I can go to the Mac OS X Server web site and read all the documentation for things related to "standards-based management," "share printers and files," "n-tier" solutions.
We can do that now to, even without going to apple.com, thanx to yhis "tiny" informative article
Or we won't...
Where did you get this "After 90 days, you can still get help -- including more advanced topics -- but it will cost you from $6,000 to $50,000." quote? Link? Facts?
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
The main reason Apple developed the XServe is because their original server, the iRack, was inadvertenly taken over by the US military due to a typo.
Novell does the same thing. It's not that surprising, businesses are used to paying per client. What I do like is that it only costs $1000 for unlimited clients. That seems pretty cheap. You have to buy Mac hardware though, so it makes sense that they don't charge as much for the OS.
Please stop saying that MacOS X unix tools is based upon FreeBSD.
:
/usr/bin/* /bin/* /sbin/* /usr/sbin/* 2>/dev/null | fgrep OpenBSD | wc -l /usr/bin/* /bin/* /sbin/* /usr/sbin/* 2>/dev/null | fgrep FreeBSD | wc -l /usr/bin/* /bin/* /sbin/* /usr/sbin/* 2>/dev/null | fgrep NetBSD | wc -l
:
Apple actually took parts of NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Most tools actually come from OpenBSD.
If you got MacOS X and if you need a proof, just try
ident
ident
ident
Here's what I get on Darwin 7.2.0 (Panther, everything up to date)
OpenBSD : 303
FreeBSD : 258
NetBSD : 143
The rest is mostly GNU tools.
{{.sig}}
I think Apple missed the boat not supporting these Macs with OS X. They make great little OS X workhorses.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
So is there a client limit on regular OS X? (Client)
I'm not sure if this is a joke or if this is a typical Mac user's view of the computing landscape today.
How many clients can connect to OS X Client? That would be interesting to know. Granted, the server version comes with tools, but what tools are really there that aren't available for free somewhere?
stuff |
Must be nice, ever consider adoption? ;D
--- Do you believe in the day?
As an engineer it's offensive to see limiters put into software for non technical reasons.
"Mac OS X is Unix."
Be careful about statements like that. The Open Group could sue you for that...rightfully so. Mac OS X is not Unix. It's Unix-based. Whatever. FreeBSD rocks.
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
While you can easily do everything that Panther Server does on your linux box, what Panther excels in is integration. Specifically the binding together of OpenLDAP, Samba, Apache, Postfix, IMAP, POP, and CUPS with the OpenDirectory password server. OpenDirectory's password server is essentially a SASL password store that they've hacked all the programs mentioned to interact directly with it for all authentication. Think of it similarly to what pam does for linux. The nice thing about OpenDirectory is that a password change from any of these mechanisms (say via samba) then all of the password hashes in the database are automatically synced (even kerberos is synced). This makes for very slick administration of users all from one central console. In the past on Linux, it was not uncommon to have to hack together some scripts to syncronize ldap, samba, and kerberos authentication stores. Even in the best case right now, samba password hashes have to be kept in the ldap database along with either an md5 hash for unix logins, or a pointer to kerberos. With OpenDirectory, there are no passwords stored in ldap itself. Instead an Apple Password field points to the password database which can provide md5 challenges and responses, samba challenges, and general password verification.
Essentially OpenDirectory brings all the technologies together that we already use and make them into a service that competes very well with Active Directory or NDS.
Another bonus is that since OpenDirectory (all its parts including the SASL password database and patches to cups, samba, etc) is open source, we could build a complete OpenDirectory-compatible system on Linux. I plan to do this over the next year or so. Most likely there will have to be a pam module created, and some patches made to OpenLDAP, Samba, etc. But it's a very exciting example of how to put open source projects together and have them work really well.
You know, a lot of friends and colleagues have been laughing at me when I tell them that Mac is the new force to be reckoned with. I've been watching them for a little while now and ever since they integrated FreeBSD into their OS, they've taken on a new direction which seems a lot more proffitable.
Don't get me wrong, I still have my two Linux and two OpenBSD boxes at home along with the obligatory windows boxes for the wife, daughter and gaming.. but you know what? I'd love to get my hands on one of them OS X boxes..
If you don't think I'm right.. that's your opinion.. but I know if I had OS X experience, I might be able to get a job Here!
---
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife in the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.
So asking a reasonable question is trolling now? Yeah, right.
If you buy an xserve you get osx unlimited client version...
...I really do want to know why I should use this in a Win2K environment. My boss wouldn't care what I get as long as it does the job. What I want to know is: Can this server provide me with tools to form a good bridge between Windows, Apple, and Linux clients?
SAMBA 3, from what I read is GREAT, but it in no way yet compares to the ease of use of MS's Active Directory tools (at least in configuring Windows clients).
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
i just want to say that i enjoyed this review, and i'm looking forward to tomorrow's followup.
/. quality, i figured that i'd actually do the opposite for a change and congratulate the editors for a 'stuff that matters' moment... i thought this article was fun to read, and not just because i too am an osx/linux weenie.
in light of the fact that its so easy to complain about
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I was wondering that myself as I read the review. Unfortunately I'm just short of 10 machines aside from my mac running 10.3 to test it out.
To me, Workgroup Manager is the reason to buy OS X Server (assuming you are running a Mac OS X network with multiple users and OS X clients). It is a nice, zero effort way to manage multiple users and client computers - controlling who can use which client computers and which files/folders will follow them around from computer to computer.
there is a two tier Mac OS X server licenseing structure...
little guy - 10 clients - $500
everyone above that - limited only by performance - $1000
the drop-dead MSCE-simple admin tools of Mac OS X Server more than justify the $1000 difference in price vs Linux if you're going to be running these things by yourself, and you have a real job on top of it.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
yuck,
another esri
Wow, even when there's no article to click on to read, you don't even read the review - just the headline and the "Reply" button. Try to read it, and understand that the Apple hardware is super reliable, supported, and runs an easy to use, high performance, standards-based OS with open-source apps. Then consider that many people have Mac technique experience, from GUI to other skills, and those skills can be used to get the power of a commercial unix server: MacOSX Server.
--
make install -not war
You're missing the killer server features.
You know how Kerberos can be a real pain to set up and manage? Well with Panther Server, if you've set up a box as an Open Directory master, it automatically integrates itself as a KDC.
Any boxes which log into that OD/LDAP directory automatically retrieve the relevant Kerberos information from the LDAP store, no extra configuration required.
The AFP server, the SMB server, the POP/IMAP/SMTP servers are all Keberized, as is the ssh daemon, and the loginwindow of any client machines.
It's probably worth discussing the fact that Apple have finally gotten their shit together with regards to command line administration, as in that everything you can do with the GUI tools you now have *simple* command line equivalents.
ie, no more screwing around with NetInfo and inserting properties by hand to construct mounts/users, you now have proper tools.
Apple finally did the smart thing and followed what most OSXS admins have been doing for a few years, they've dropped their proprietary AppleMailServer in favour of postfix+cyrus.
They've pretty much dropped NetInfo for network directories, it's now just restricted to a local store, and LDAP publishes this information by default. You can still run a NetInfo directory, and indeed I've got boxes logging into both my old NetInfo directory and my new LDAP directory so that I can do user migration more easily.
There are a wealth of features that weren't even touched upon by this review, it's just kind of lame to read a home user's review of a server product.
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Interesting.. I got 287/224/126. I wonder whats different about our boxes. I've got everything updated, as well.
Dunno about OS X, but in Mac OS 9 and older, there was a 10-client limit-- it wouldn't surprise me if that limitation lived on in OS X Client.
Oh, you'll pay. Don't think you won't pay...
having spent half the day yesterday working on getting 10.3 server with Open Directory/PDC mojo working on a brand new xserve, let me just say that Apple does not have 10.3 server configuring itself correctly at all. 1. DNS is not turned on or preconfigured with a minimally working zone file. 2. Kerberos isn't set up or on. And if it isn't set up, Open Directory wont work. Oops, did I mention that DNS isn't on either? That will also prevent Kerberos and OD from working. 3. The LDAP db that gets set up is buggered from the start because of 1 and 2. 4. Because of 1, 2 and 3, forget getting the Windows PDC stuff working. A nice Apple server tech sent me a loooong handwritten doc on what needed to be changed to get it all to work, which it did after I followed it. But, out of the box, even after those nice configuration wizard screens, it just isn't set up correctly. Amazing.
I have been a Linux user for about 10 years (when I first got Slackware over a 1200 baud modem) and until recently I was using a super-cheap Linux box to run Java server side stuff for my little NLP software business.
I switched over to using an old G4 Mac for running web services about 4 months ago. It is a little too early to tell, but I seem to be spending less time taking care of the G4 server (approxametely 1 hour a month - and I think that I used to spend 2 or 3 hours a month messing with my Linux server).
Anyway, a life for old Macs :-)
-Mark
Modded down, eh? I guess the Slashdot editors aren't ready to come out of the closet, then?
Maybe he has more packages installed than you?
I used to work for a reseller, and we were beta-testing Mac OS Server 10.1. We noticed that on a 10 user license, AppleShare clients did indeed top out at 10 users. However, SMB, NFS, Apache, etc. was unlimited. We asked if this was normal behavior, and the answer was that if you were using MOSXS for anything other than AppleShare, there was intentionally *no* difference between 10-user and unlimited. Therefore, if you had 5 Macs, and 500 other clients, you could still use the 10-user version!
Weird, but true. Of course that was over 2 years ago, so the policy may have changed, but I still believe that the 10-user limit is only for AppleShare clients. Odd, as you could have more than 10 OS X boxes browse SMB shares on OS X Server without exceeding the limit!
CC
the writer meant that Mac/Windows network integration services is a small corner of the computing world. That's the only way I can read it that doesn't make the writer sound extremely isolated.
creation science book
As pointed out elsewhere, they're actually limiting the number of simultaneous connections in the $500 version of the software, not the total number of users.
I would like to point out that the Xserve hardware ships with the unlimited client license by default, a selling point Steve Jobs touted when unveiling the Xserve G5 at his latest MacWorld keynote address. This provides an incentive to businesses to purchase the latest Xserve hardware; since Apple still makes the lion's share of its profits off of hardware, this makes all kinds of sense.
I was starting to wonder the same thing. But then again, Apple people seem to like throwing more money around.
jason
Note: I use windows (Legally) and occasionally I'll turn on my linux system.
> Please stop saying that MacOS X unix tools is based upon FreeBSD.
> Apple actually took parts of NetBSD, FreeBSD
> and OpenBSD.
> Most tools actually come from OpenBSD.
**YAWN **
Most source files that, when compiled, have RCS IDs in the resulting object file, and that are used to build tools, came from OpenBSD.
Try running a script such as
and look at the output. Many tools have no RCS IDs in the binary. Some of them have multiple RCS IDs in them, as more than one source file for a tool in that set has an RCS ID in it that shows up in the object file.
If we prune that output to leave, for each tool, only one line for each OS for each tool, we get 85 lines for NetBSD, 75 lines for FreeBSD, and 19 lines for OpenBSD - OpenBSD is overrepresented in your results because, for example, the OpenSSH stuff came from OpenBSD, with each tool having multiple source files, and most if not all of those files put the RCS ID into the binary.
NetBSD is slightly overrepresented by the counts I gave, as Panther's yacc came from NetBSD, and its skeleton parser puts an RCS ID into the object file; if we remove those 7 lines, we get 78 for NetBSD.
Of course, there are a lot of commands that don't have any RCS information at all. 171 commands do, but there are a total of 928 commands. This means that your counts and my counts don't necessarily give any believable information about the number of tools that came from FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD, unless all the tools without RCS IDs came from elsewhere (GNU, Apple, etc.).
Run yellow dog or geentoo linux..
As the subject, ever heard of LDAP?
Um, maybe he doesn't want to run wire through his house. Mobility isn't the only reason for wireless. A couple hundred dollars instead of a few hours of wiring plus unsightly wiring seems like a pretty good deal to me.
So take a pill, you cheap shit!
Hi, I have pac man fever so I bought the most expensive box at the store - OSX Server.
I put it on my computer, and then put a laptop on top of my stereo.
And then I dont really use it for managing stuff or sharing files theres only me and my cat in the house, also I dont know about technical stuff like kerbones because I'm not much of a computer guy I just know the most expensive stuff HAS to be the best.
So all in all I give Mac OSX Server a 10 out of 10 it is very cool and has wonderful animated icons, and not too many buttons on the mouse to confuse me.
Stay tuned for part 2 of my review, where I plan to put my iPod next to it and take pictures!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
only costs $1000 for unlimited clients. That seems pretty cheap. You have to buy Mac hardware though, so it makes sense that they don't charge as much for the OS.
Note: the new G5 XServes come bundled with an unlimited client license.
I have no idea about his situation, but I know that some houses here (in Denmark) are protected (as historic buildings), and as such the things you can do to them are limited. In that case it might make perfect sence to use wireless, if you want to avoid having cables lying around. Or maybe he just wanted to have the connection hidden and found that having proper hidden cabling done (in his home) would be more expensive (and/or otherwise undesirable) than doing a wireless link.
This boy need to do less of die cocaine and stop leaving da server lying round.
It might not a bad idea to hardwire the laptop, tho I prolly don't have a full idea of his constraints preventing this. The G3/600 can only use an 802.11b Airport IIRC, which brings the whole wireless network down to ~22MBps.
I find it odd how you can be personally offended by someone's use of a base station. For a PowerBook G3/400 you need to use a PCMCIA Airport card running the open source driver found here: http://wirelessdriver.sourceforge.net/
There is no Airport card for the PowerBook G3/400 or a supported USB device.
However, I'll tolerate your lack of knowledge, but I can't give your comment much credit.
Here is a review of Panther Server for you from OS News http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5221
.\.\att Clare
That's interesting, but what does Netcraft have to say about it? And what about Kreskin?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
If you were, you might be able to spell too.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I looked at the XServe for a NAS solution but couldn't find any information on things such as snapshots. Is it there? Coming?
Xserve has always come with an unlimited client license. If you buy OS X Server on its own, however, you can get either a 10-user or an unlimited license. The unlimited costs twice as much as the 10-user.
Yes. The Xserve comes with the Unlimited license. If you buy, say, a PowerMac, then you can choose three OS X flavors: Client, Server (10-seat), and Server (Unlimited seat).
-- SegFault
"One day, some time ago, something important happened."
There's the rub, you're paying for the support - a grand isn't *that* much for unlimited clients if you get support (especially unlimited free, as somebody has claimed). How much is RH Enterprise?
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
``Remote Apple Events has been in Mac OS for many years, since back in version 7-dot-something. It allows controlling "scriptable" Mac applications -- such as with AppleScript -- over the network. It used to run over AppleTalk, but now runs over plain old TCP/IP. Not many people make use of remote Apple events in my experience, but I use them often; for example, I have a Perl script that queries iTunes on a remote box, and sets the current track in iChat.''
Does this mean that, on macs, you can
1. Script GUI apps
2. Script them over the network
? That gives the traditional unices a run for their money, I should think...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Say "BSD", please. If you say "UNIX" SCO will sue Apple and Darl McBride will institute "introductory" OSX license pricing of $1000 a seat.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Here's what Netcraft has to say....
</Blatant Plug>
--Paul
Trainer/Curriculum Developer
Apple Computer
"WTF are you using Server for?! Git something L33T like a Linux boxen!" No, thanks. Been there, done that, took too much of my limited time.
I'll be using my new PowerMac G5 with OS X Server (10-client) to host Postfix, Apache, MySQL, file sharing, printer, user accounts...
Oh, yeah... Damn. Linux can already do that. True, but Linux can't run Quick Time Pro. Nor can it allow me to do a Batch Capture for Final Cut Pro. Nor will it allow me to use AppleScript to generate all kinds of crap for my piecing together of video.
Everything has a place. Everything has a purpose.
They do. Every G5 XServe configuration except the cluster node (which isn't designed to be used to Windows file sharing anyway) comes with an unlimited client license. It's only if you buy the cluster node, configure a built to order XServe or buy OS X Server separately that you can get the 10-client version.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You should just shut up and get back to your goddamn trains.
RTFA. buy an xserve get the server with an unlimmed client lic.
You said frelling. I hope Ka D'argo catches you talking that way. He might like it.
www.farscape.com
Help me Mr. Wizard! Help me!
Depending on the length of the cable run and what you have to punch through, that's exactly what I'd do. As a matter of fact, that's what I'm doing to connected up to my stereo.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
This class of comment was funny for the first 3 or 4 Apple stories /. did, but now it's just obvious. Come on people, let's get original.
I don't suppose it's possible that he uses a mobil wireless laptop in his house, and often finds himself out of range of the first base station, and thus the second one doubles as a net connection for both the MP3 player and a nother laptop is it? No I suppose having a logical explination would shatter your world view.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Think of the $500 as a cheap version for small businesses or students.
For students, it's even cheaper. The educational pricing is $249 for the 10-user version and $499 for the unlimited version.
, a G4 card in it, and a huge IDE system (with RAID or without) AND running Mac OS X Server. I think Apple missed the boat not supporting these Macs with OS X. They make great little OS X workhorses.
I don't think so, especially when it comes to the MacOS X Server. Remember that the 90-days "up and running" support is included in this package. PowerMacs of the 9xxx series are unable to run MacOS X without a third-party G3 upgrade card. So now Apple would have to test and support their system not on the Apple-branded hardware. They could probably do this - but this would be obviously a more expensive solution for them; especially now, when many third-party manufacturers of these cards simply no longer exist. And the whole gain would be at least questionable. These machines were running on a 33-50 MHz system bus. They have ridicolous limitations on the harddrive size (first partition must be smaller than 8 GB). Their extremely obsolete graphics cards cannot run Quartz Extreme (yes, I know, it's not that important on a server - but then again, if all you need is a headless server, why don't you just put Linux on it?). The G3 daughterboard cards generally had many compatibility and stability issues, making them a bad choice for a server and at best a stop-gap choice for workstations. I think that "running MacOS X Server on a G3-upgraded 9600" is just an even-more-geeky kind of "imagine a Beowulf cluster of these". Funny thing to think of to kill spare time, but nothing of practical value.
Simplicity is a main factor. I've used Linux for years (started at Slackware 0.99). I recent got a PowerMac w/ Server (10-seat) on it. I hate working in the guts of Linux. It takes so damn much reading, that I run out of time. I know, I know... "You're just stupid." Ok, fine. Whatever. My time is more valuable than the cost of the OS.
I am using FreeBSD-CURRENT at home and I am happy with it. And sometimes I'm getting sad about how crippled Mac OS X Server got, because Apple decided to make GUIs for most things, which:
Let's take cyrus-imapd, e.g.
Secondly, I don't like the Classic environment. It is highly unstable in conjuction with Apple-events (Applescript). I am getting "Apple Event Timeouts" all the time with Adobe's Framemaker and the error messages are not very helpful.
Sometimes Classic goes up to 100% CPU usage and I have to kill it manually. It happens mostly when one application starts another application within Classic. This happens often when VISE-installer is calling himself to install a second application, which is a part of the whole package. I managed crash the Classic-engine a couple of times, while starting Mac OS 9 applications.
Maybe you have different experience, but for me it stays a disaster, because I need the G4 sometimes. One thing is sure, the upgrade from 10.2 to 10.3 brought more stability, but that's all to be happy about.
People who want 1> reliable, long lived hardware 2> relatively easy, familiar operating environment with standard apps 3> affordable support from an experienced, user-friendly service organization that actually develops the tech they're supporting. Total Cost of Ownership studies are probably available from Apple, and I'd expect they're compelling, especially for the installed base of Mac shops. You'd be surprised how much easier selling a server platform to IT can be, when there's a marketing team with decades of experience behind them, a brand name before them, and solid business cases for their technology holding it all together.
--
make install -not war
Wow, you're a bad reader. Settle down already. Where did you read that he had an XServe?
nowhere, that's where.
What about the nontechnical limiter placed in engines? Or is hardware exempt from your wrath?
Actually that would mean that Apple is charging per connection, not per user.
My understanding was that it was 10 concurrent users, any of which can have more than one "connection". Is it just 10 connections?
When I had both machines in place I ran into an issue where I had to rebuild the main one, so I transferred the data to the secondary server and planned to swap them. I changed their settings and IP addresses ... and all of the user accounts on the primary file server disappeared.
This was odd.
I Googled for it and came up with the answer: if you set up a password server on 10.2 Server you can't change the machine's IP address. This has to do with how Apple built the LDAP system that manages passwords, so it's a requirement if you want Windows file sharing (Samba in disguise) enabled. Which I did.
I called Apple tech support and they confirmed it: if I wanted to do Windows file sharing, I needed to set up a "password server" (LDAP). And if I set up a password server, I couldn't change the IP address of the machine. Ever. If I did, the users and groups would vanish into thin air. I asked if I could back up the user and group databases and then upload them again ... and they said no. Not without stripping the passwords out. So I'd have to have my users reset their passwords.
I was stunned. The inability to back up user account information, complete with passwords, and to change the IP address is ridiculous, and not the mark of a true, flexible server OS. So right now I'm migrating them to PPC Linux with Samba. I know 10.3 Server probably addresses these issues, but Linux is just simpler. Heck, all I have to do with Linux/Samba is replicate the passwd, group, shadow and smbpasswd files between the machines. Instant mirror servers. And it'll just work.
Besides, tar and mt will give me better control over tape backups than Retrospect did. Retrospect was always propting me for tapes of a particular set, and rejecting tapes that were from the wrong set. I don't give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys about backup sets. On Linux, it's just "See that tape drive? Put the data there, and shut up about it." And it does. And it's good.
End of rant.
Heh. A 9500 only has two drive bays- three if you feel like ripping out the floppy and boring holes in the case with a dremel. When it comes to internal drive capacity, you want a 9600, 8600, or beige G3- all of which have internal tray capacity for five drives (one 3.5, then four in the front that are universal trays with mounts for floppy, zip, hard drive, and CDRom- you can easily drop out the floppy and smack in a hard drive). Alternatively, you can add a few firewire cards and load in several drives, but you're still limited by the system bus. :P
:)
:D
My home fileserver is a beige G3/266 with 256 megs of ram. Two IDE hard drives - a 60 and an 80- UWSCSI for an internal 4g disk, an Adaptec 29{3|4}0 card for the outboard 9g SCA drive that holds the OS, and an Apple rom 10/100 ethernet card. It's running 10.2 Server (10.2.0- I've never bothered to patch it up) and runs out basic file services to my home network. Runs like a champ, minus the initial pains in the arse of getting the OS actually ON. All of the SLOW one experiences in OS X is totally at the graphical userland level, in my experience- which isn't something the server uses. My workstation (also a biege G3, running Panther Client thanks to XPF) is a slug, and it has 128 more ram than the server... but I use it largely for gui stuff, and the OS is (UNFORTUNATELY) on an IDE drive- the big SCSI went into the server.
I could easily do the server on my 9600 with the Sonnet ATA/66 card that's in my 7300, but the ATA card seems to be a bit flaky, and the 9600's already running linux just fine....
Alternatively, I could toss on Server 1.1 without using XPF at all. It's neat to play with if you can find the media, although I personally wouldn't use it for anything other than Apple File Services.
It is less hassle to get 10.2 or 10.3 onto a beige mac, if you don't have much linux experience- but linux has this funny habit of supporting older hardware that OS X screams about.
The reason for this is that the software serving these other non-Apple protocols is open source. What's the benefit to Apple of wasting programmer time modifying the Apache code to limit it to 10 users. Anyone could easily download the source and build their own.
Basically, all this would do is give Apple a seriously bad image among admins.
OTOH, the support for Apple developed protocols is probably not open source. This allows them to do whatever they want with it.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
It is 10 concurrent AFP connections. Just like Mac OS has had on the client for years now. All other services should not be affected by the limit.
The Linux/BSD folks are very passionate about their command-lines. I agree. I love command-line. The "lickity-clickity" stuff doesn't get in the way. As I'm using my PowerBook, watching in Process Monitor, the GUI is taking approximately 0.4% of my CPU. Yes, if I start doing lots of GUI operations, the percentage will rise.
My point is, the GUI on OSX Server is really helpful. It puts a simple face on something that can be complicated.
Don't forget that all the GUI operations can also be done from the command-line.
Well, I admin an XServe in a mixed Mac/Win32 environment, we've got the XServe pulling accounts out of the AD and serving them up to the Macs in a 'native' fashion. The XServe is also streaming over 7000 files from the AV department, running LPD print queues for ALL the network printers, and doing whatevr else I feel like making it do.
As for the 'lickable' GUI, I never really have to see it, there's a problem if you're looking at your server's desktop a lot. And honestly, doing all that it does, the CPU load rarely hits 3%, do I really give a flying shit if the GUI sucks a few cycles off the top? Nope. The GUI doesn't slow things down when it's not being used, after all.
And for what we use it for, it really is the best solution out there.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
If you have a x100 lying around, or a 7200, your options consist of MKLinux or MacOS. Unless developers have made serious progress on that front, and personally, I can't imagine there being much motivation to do so. :)
:D
:-)
The only major issue I've had with linux on older mac hardware is the usual X11 nightmare, specifically with motherboard video on 8500s/7300s. Back when it was a priority for me, the one x11 config I found was wrong. THAT was a fun experience....
Another issue I've had - which is largely due to the fact I'm a longtime mac user and used to things Just Working- is that the linuces I've tried on my hardware have a funny tendency to ignore SCSI cards or refuse to boot with certain hardware in place- I have an Orange Micro board that OS X cheerfully ignores, OS 9 sees without a problem, which makes Linux quite angry, which I find fairly amusing.
Then there's modem support.
Depending on your needs and hardware, you're definitely going to get a LOT more performance out of linux than you will with OS X on beige hardware- especially if you intend to actually use a GUI. In which case, well... X11 is a SPEED DEMON on a 7300's motherboard video compared to Jaguar.
That doesn't explain why you would pay extra money for this. Can't you do everything on the list you just mentioned without paying the Apple premium for hardware and software?
It's all based on the same free software you'd get from a Linux distro. What exactly are you paying for, if not the GUI? Brand name?
http://afp548.com/
It's a great site with lots of very informative, down and dirty technical articles. They also have a forum where you can post questions.
The same guys produce some utilities designed to make VPN and DNS easier...
Please explain how on earth a 1U 2 processor Xserve could possibly "replace" a Sun Enterprise system. Because that's "high end", believe it or not. 32 processors. Hundreds of gigabytes of ram. Disk arrays that fill closets, not 3-5U. Please point me to the SAN(no, the Xraid is NOT a SAN!) and tape backup solutions offered by Apple. Sun *used* to be the end-all-be-all when it came to high-end servers, but apart from the Sun Fires it seems that Apple has much more to offer these days.
You're smoking crack, considering Apple makes ONE model in three configs, and Sun offers everything from a Sun Fire that costs 1/2 as much as the Xserve, to systems in the millions of dollars range...and the tools that can manage that kind of hardware effectively(apple's tools are neat, but not ready for managing hundreds of servers etc.)
Please help metamoderate.
If you mean authentication realms, you can just define them to use usernames from Open Directory.
otherwise I'm not sure what you mean?
i don't read slashdot anymore.
Well, it may be more "helpful" but it certainly isn't easier, faster, or simpler than editing a text file.
Is that what Apple people are paying extra for? The online help?
Do you even know what a high-end server is?
Try here, here, and here.
Mods, this is flamebait, pure and simple.
Yes, for those who know the commands and content, the command-line and text files will always be easier and definitely faster.
For those who don't care about delving that deep, OSX Server is a pretty good solution.
If I were a professional System Administrator, I'd probably have gotten a PenguinComputing Relion 430 S with RedHat on it (the 430S isn't out yet, but it's very similar to their 430).
at least do some math first:
Bet you mistake Ikea furniture as collectible 60's Euro design, too.The potato it is uninformed.
You are paying for the 64 bit G5 hardware, the OS is icing on the cake.
Run a god damn wire you dumb shit! You've thrown away several HUNDRED dollars so you can be cool and have wireless to a STATIONARY laptop.
Not everybody has a house in which it is easy to run wire through the walls, or likes seeing wires running along the baseboards and doorjambs all over the place. Once you factor in the value of the time to run the wire, he may well be saving money.
If you run a Mac network, you can do really cool stuff with Automount points. All my Macs mount a /Network/Application, /Network/Library, and a few other mount points thrown in. The GUI land includes /Network/Library in the search path for stuff, (/System/Library for system installed stuff, /Library for stuff installed by the Admin, ~/Library for stuff installed by you, nice and clean and straightforward).
/Network/Applications (server installed apps with drag-and-drop, really nice) /Network/Library (frameworks for custom Cocoa apps, etc) /Network/Software (software installers, why not, right) ... and the Users share, that unfortunately can't be automounted as /Network/Users
Each AFP mount counts against the license, no biggie... 7 Macs, all permenantly connected, and we had 3 connections left for laptops.
Incorrect. While all my connections, once logged in, go through one AFP connection, the Automount connections are done anonymously. Oh no, 2 AFP connections from machine->server, anonymous automounts, then w/ permissions mounts. It's worse! Each automount creates it's OWN connection.
So we were automounting:
well, I had 4 (at the time) automounts, so the first two machines to boot were fine, but machine 3 was all messed up.
Took forever to diagnose and realize that we needed an unlimited license.
Took a few hours with Apple support to diagnose, and they didn't figure out the problem until I started at Server Admin and had the problem. Users couldn't log in, because starting with machine 3, they couldn't get their home directories.
I REALLY like OS X Server's admin tools. LDAP went from scary and impossible to point-and-click. However, even with Panther Server, MUCH better than Jaguar Server, it has some issues.
Alex
Yes, and KDE 2.x and 3.x have it too in the form of dcop. dcop is a command-line tool that allows one access to an exported set of functions in any given KDE program. dcop bindings are available for many languages and dcop itself can be used in conjunction with the shell to script events. And yes, it even works on the network, with encryption if I add another pipe (wow, the magic of UNIX).
Seems like you've already answered your question. He's already got the hardware. He's got disposable cash and curiosity. Instead of the licky-clicky gui getting in the way of the server, it makes it accessible.
CLI is not the be-all-end-all interface. It may ultimately be quicker, but only if the user has memorized all the archane commands, switches and input options. Some of us would rather skip the month of learning commands, and prefer to just hook up a box, fill out a few dialogs, click some checkboxes and have it work.
It doesn't bode well for the CSs out there to have such easily administered servers, but technology continually obsolesces jobs (e.g., whatever happened to typesetters?).
The potato it is uninformed.
As a businessman, I find it offensive that you are trying to dictate how much a business can charge for their product.
The main reason why I bought OS X server 3 years a go and (have kept on upgrading) was to be able to use the QuickTime streaming server. I use it in conjunction with Apache to stream QuickTime movies embedded in web pages all from the same server.
You can now use the free Darwin streaming server on different platforms. By now I am used to using OS X server.
The remote GUI admin tools are nice and now I use it for MySQL/ Apache/PHP (slightly older version pre installed), and file sharing between win2k and mac workstations.
Just exactly the same they pay M$ Corp... they ( beancounters) think they can have overall savings by cutting on sysadmin's salaries and, maybe most important, they feel good because they think they know how to administer a server.. "mark that checkbox, press apply, then Ok and it is done; one less for the admins"
Running those same commands on my FreeBSD 4.9 server, I get the results: 60/6769/440
The *BSDs share so much code between each other, and most source files have ident tags from different *BSDs, that Apple could have mostly pulled from FreeBSD and may still produce the numbers you saw.
And if I set up a password server, I couldn't change the IP address of the machine. Ever.
This has been addressed by Apple with a script to change the IP settings everywhere necessary, without breaking any services.
Works like a charm, I had to do it a couple months ago for a client.
~Philly
An important feature of OS X Server is the Server Administration tools. My own home server, which has the internal 6 meg ATI chipset (see above post in this thread) is a slug when I need to hit the gui. But I don't. Apple has provied Server Admin Tools with OS X Server, and the tools for Jag run very well under Panther client. These gui tools allow me to add users, manage shares, manage printers, quicktime streaming (if in use), configure Apache to an extent, DHCP, Netboot.... basically, everything you DO with a server that you don't do with client. And the tools can be installed on ANY machine running OS X. Load them up, they ask for a server IP or domain name. Enter it in, it asks for your password for the server (admin accounts only, naturally). And BLAM!
:-)
:-) And I've never had problems with hard drives bigger than 8g running OS X on IDE host adapters- I had 10.1 installed on a 60g in a 9500 awhile back, and it was Just Fine. This is due entirely to the controller- the system sees it as a SCSI drive. :D
I have complete remote control of all of my server functions from my workstation, and the ones I can't access via the gui tools can be hit through the command line. With the older Server 1.x, you needed a web browser to manage shares, which was both interesting (the convienience) and annoying (security, you needed to be at ANOTHER MACHINE that WASN'T THE SERVER to do it).
Yeah, you can do hardcore awesome amounts of remote management with linux (I recently recompiled a kernel, formatted a RAID array, installed and set up samba, netatalk, and genrally completely configured a linux server from my desktop through a slew of terminal windows. SO SEXY OMG), but the gui tools for OS X are AWESOME for admins with limited command line fu- I got Jaguar Server up and completely configured just how I wanted it without help, compared to both of my monitors being strewn with google searches and man page entries with my linux configuration process. Some people don't want to do it the hard way, and can't afford the new toys.
As for compatability and stability of G3 boards... I only had stability problems if I diddled with the defaults on the control software. So I didn't. I've run OS X, Linux, and MacOS 9.x on g3 upgraded machines, rock solid, without difficulties.
And concerning the 8 gig limit- that only affects Beige G3s and the original iMacs. And only on IDE drives. My workstation had to be partitioned (80g- 8/2/$), my iMac had to be partitioned (60g, 6/54), and my server didn't (9g SCA). It's an IDE thing, not a SCSI thing, and the old beige machines such as the 9600 are SCSI.
What I really want to know is whether OS X server can do filesystem snapshots (a la NetApp, Win2k3 storage server, Veritas-FS, etc), and if not, when are they going to support this feature.
There is no UI in ServerAdmin, but there is a GUI tool for MySQL management on OS X Server called 'MySQL Manager.' It is pretty limited in functionality, but it is there.
Note that all XServes ship with X Server, so the cost of the software is only if you are installing it on other hardware.
The features that make the software nicer than Linux (simple setup, integrated password management, easy to use/set up Kerberos, hand holding phone support, etc.) are aimed at a class of people who typically find that it is well worth the $500 they may have paid.
Those who are happy to spend the sea of time and effort reading the docs on configuring a completely integrated PAM/KDC/OpenLDAP/Samba/Apache setup on their choice of Free OS don't appear to be in that target market. IMHO, you can't really sell much in the way of software to people like that, anyway.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
It was the availability of Netatalk that convinced me to go with Linux/x86 back in 1996 to serve my Mac shop.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Sun Fire 15K Server
18 Processor/Memory Boards
72 1.2-GHz UltraSPARC III Cu Processors
8-MB ECC External Cache per Processor
288-GB Memory
2 System Controllers
6 Power Supplies
4 Fan Trays
1 PCI I/O Assemblies
1 Quad FastEthernet PCI Adapter
1 Dual Port LVD SCSI/Dual FastEthernet PCI Adapter
1 Sun StorEdge S1 Disk Array
1 External Expansion Rack
Solaris 9 Operating System Media Kit
Server Installation Service for up to 18 Domains
List Price: $2,661,730.00
Xserve G5
Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
8GB DDR400 ECC SDRAM - 8x1GB
750GB ADM (3x250GB Serial ATA)
CD-ROM
Fibre Channel PCI card - (lower slot)
Xserve RAID 3500G/14x250G/2x2GB FC
Mac OS X Server, Unlimited License
Subtotal $21,498.00
x 36 (72 G5 CPUs, 288 GB RAM, 126 TB FC RAID storage)
= $ 774,000.00
Just matching number of processors and RAM, that's $2.7 M vs. $0.7 M. Are they fully equivalent? No. Does the G5 at almost a quarter of the price look very attractive? Hell yes. Consider spending the same amount of money on G5s. You'll get 140 of the G5s. Substitute cluster nodes and you can get a whole gross with change left over.
The potato it is uninformed.
Okay, I admit it. It should be 123.0469 TB not 126 TB RAID.
The potato it is uninformed.
How much does redhat cost, now that they've gone to advanced server? Here it is:
item: basic, standard, premium
red hat enterprise, x86: 349, 799, -
red hat advanced, x86: -, $1499, $2499
red hat advanced, pseries: -, $1992, $2998
Not bad, really - it's cheaper than rhas on POWER.
I have a Beige G3 266 (oc'd to 300) as well.
We have os9 on it, and it really kills me to use it
10.1.5 is also on it, and Panther doesn't want to upgrade it, because my hardware is old.
In your experience, how well would this computer perform as a desktop (iChat, Safari, MS Office) computer?
thanks!
I'd wager that right now the Active Directory toolsets are much better and more mature than whatever you'll be using to manage samba and open directory.
I'm saying this because there are companies who's specialty is building tools to manage AD forests, while as far as I know nobody really makes real (industrial strength) tools to manage samba - and only apple (and a small part of apple at that) does anything with OD.
d00d, "porn" isn't 1337 enough! Git with the programme!
NetBoot, which is only available on OS X Server, allows clients to boot off the network. No local HD necessary and if there's a problem, simply reboot the machine. Its pretty nice for deployment in labs among other uses.
Quicktime Streaming Sever has been mentioned as well, and it's pretty sweet stuff.
Um, nope. This was settled in a death match: vi trounced Emacs 17 times before Emacs finished loading!
Actually Marathon Computing made a rackmount case which you could stuff with the innards of an iMac and called it iRack.
We've got one at work, running 10.2 Server and it does fine as an accounting and file server.
I've never even heard of Firefly, but the sig just blew my mind. It's Goram. (I think)
The beauty about the Server Package are the easy to use integrated tools that allow anyone to use this Server in a already implemented Network, Active Directory or LDAP for example. You gotta have other OS's to test and review this.
Afte playing with Panther, you won't go back to another system for Services, it's easy to use and you have all the utilities you normally would use on a Unix environment + Apple Tools.
0011 1111 0111 1010
You can get a basic idea of Panther performance in my own words here: http://www.secretaboutbox.com/museum/000098.php. It's a writeup of my workstation, which is a beige G3 with a 350 processor overclocked to 366, and 388 ram.
.
:)
My experience with installing Panther is also written up, here : http://www.secretaboutbox.com/articles/000096.php
Basically, if you have a supported video card and enough ram, you'll be able to handle iChat, Safari, and Office fine. I browse the net with the machine reviewed above through a modem shared out on my iMac, and my only problem is that Safari hogs the entire connection- so it's load pages or type in IRC.
Anything more demanding than Office / internet (like video, games, photoshop), and you'll be tearing your hair out.
It's economically more efficient to have differential pricing so that you can suck as much as possible out of the people who are willing to pay the most, then suck as much as possible out of the people who are willing to pay less, and so forth. It's cheaper to create and maintain only one codebase, but if the product were the same, nobody would pay more than the minimum. Thus, differential pricing by artificial limiters!, since corporations will always do what is cheapest and maximizes profitability. See this article by Hal Varian for more information.
If the alternative is an exposed wire or tunnelling through plaster or crawling around in a crawlspace? $400 bucks isn't so bad. If you live in a house older than about 40 years old, going through a wall isn't a light endeavor.
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
Run netbsd if you want a bsd flavor on it.
Though I had to move our workplace linux server into testing to snag a netatalk revision that doesn't BARF on panther, and stable revisions don't do more than the Classic MacOS filename limitations. :| And then the size limitations- afpd doesn't like anything over two gigs in my experience.... and I have a few files in the 13-16 range (I do video). So we wound up using Samba and Netatalk on the box, and juggling between the two for data transfer. :P
:-)
Still, you can get the aforementioned anemic macs on ebay for 25-100$ (depending on options), and a newer box is going to be a bit pricier, even if it's a PC. I know if I buy an 8500 for 25$ that I'm not going to have to buy a second ethernet card for it, and if all I need is a DHCP server, hey... some people don't like to deal with a bios.
Don't forget; RedHat Enterprise has this feature, too...
Correct me if I'm wrong
That's right! I mean, god forbid I should actually be able to set up my company's DNS in less than 14 hours, without the O'Reilly in my hand.
Who do these people think they are, making my life easier? They should be taken out and shot, all of them.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Applescript is amazingly powerful. I have a friend who runs a (very simple) robot on a MMORPG using just an applescript. It's also quite simple.
I've never used the remote abilities much, mind you. Except a few times for quitting a iChat or mail.app or something else remotely.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
Well, I had an old 8600/250G3 with over 800GB of HD space crammed into it for quite a while, running 10.2 Server. I had no end of trouble getting 10.3 server to run on it, and have given up for the moment.
SATA is NOT, repeat NOT, a substitute for SCSI (that the Sun servers you selected has)... You try running 100 users on a SATA drive, then on a SCSI drive.. and tell me which one is better... SCSI may be equal to or even outperformed by SATA on a desktop, but that doesn't come close to flying on a server...
Plus, the interconnect between the 18 processor/memory boards in the Sun Fire 15k is going to be vastly superior to anything you could use to cluster a bunch of XServes together...
They're apples and oranges...!
Don't tell Bush that there's an iRack not under his control!
Sure, you might be able to build a server cheaper that Apple's, but compare hardware cost to a comparable HP or Dell server. Most corps are still buying the bigger names with actual support for their servers, and the differences in price between them and Apple are trifling.
I'm (knock on wood) on the verge of replacing 2 Windows servers with a spanky new G5 Xserve, and part of the argument for the change is that the hardware cost is virtually the same as what we will spend for the next PC server we buy, but the OS will be much cheaper.
Plus, we get extra goodies like a database server and vpn server built in for no extra cost (we're still a Windows 2000 shop, no fancy built-in vpn here). Not to mention no extra user fees when we upgrade the OS.
Well, crap. It looks like we just wasted $500 on unlimited Server for that shiny new G5. We only have 2 other Macs and a shitload of Windows/Sun/SGI machines. Oh well, not my money!
You need to take your paper MCSE back to the mill where you bought it! People with (l)user attitude, like you, shouldn't set their hands anywhere NEAR a server...let alone try and configure one. I'm not really trying to be elitist or deriding here, but you sound like you want the AOL install approach where you can toss the CD in and have a server 30 minutes later. Get real, get a clue and until you do leave the server setups to professionals.
If your network is mixed like ours with static and dynamic ips and a MS DNS server :-( , it isn't plug and play. We had to upgrade all of the 10.2 clients to 10.3 to get it so users could authenticate. Was it kerberos? I don't know. What I hated about the configuration was the dc=booger dc=froogle dc=et cetera to get the client to bind to the server. You would think that somebody would write a parser to handle it. Also the user lists don't update immediately and you have the feeling that the machine didn't take the user entries although when you test it, it works. OOH and another thing, does anybody know how to get it to mount the RAID if it has to restart?
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
NeXTStep: Mach 2.x kernel with BSD 4.3 userland plus some proprietary stuff on top including a proprietary windowing system using DisplayPS.
Mac OS X: Mach 3.x kernel with BSD 4.4+ (mostly from FreeBSD) userland plus some proprietary stuff on top including a proprietary windowing system using Display PDF
Note a similarity?
10.3 (finally) updated a lot of userland from FreeBSD 3.x stuff so we have decent IPv6 support and several other improvments, major and minor.
Mach, from CMU, threads nicely and did well for NeXT. HFS+ is all but proprietary (it would be neat if the OS X UFS implementation wasn't quite so old).
We'll skip over the whole Jobs'ism of DisplayPS and Objective C and creating NI when my other 12 *nix architectures spoke NIS (only). LDAP is a fine replacement for NI/NIS/NIS+. If only I could run a window from another machine without VNC. It's just like SunView :)
The big big win is pulling over NetBSD's pkgsrc (free and openbsd call it "ports") and use it on OS X (or solaris, or linux or irix).
Building your tools from source means no "find the RPM and trust the guy who built it" and no issues with library versions (linux's version of DLL hell) plus you get NetBSD's pkg_* system and a good ftp client :).
Oh, and the fact that I can BUY it and get buy it and get contractually obligated support means less of a hard sell into the OpenSource Phobic corporate world....
if they'd get over that "but it's apple" thing. (yes, it's apple. the vendor that ships more Unix that any other company).
36 2x machines is not gonna do what 1 64 CPU machine will do.
- with Solaris 9's containers, I can partition up a lot of that big machine into controllable sub machines. SGI does this the best, but Solaris A (5.A?? 10 for marketing weenies) takes it steps further - mostly to match some of the LPAR stuff that IBM offers).
- SATA is simply serial ATA. It's not SCSI.
- Ever run a large Oracle|Sybase database (the main purpose for most monster Sun boxes) across 36 machines? Me neither. I *do* have it on V1280s, however.
-
Sun's also good for many many PCI busses. Not slots but independant busses.
Now I'll concur that at the <= 4CPU end, Sun doesn't really offer much. And if SGI weren't tanking for the previous 5 and next 10 years, they'd likely be doing it better (MIPS is whithering, but pluging 6 4x machines together the its craylink to make it into 1 single 24x machine is cost effective scaling.On that note, you can drop cost and boost performance buy using a nice Baydel RAID array rather than anything from Sun (I don't buy Kawasaki brand tires; I don't buy Sun brand RAID)
We can also mention the switched backplanes that expedite processors reaching RAM banks directly - not a shared bus and other things that make this a different class of computer.
With Sun, you start with a 32 way machine populated with 4 CPUs and by the time you grow, oh! those 900MHz ultra 3's aren't going to work with our newer 1200MHz chips.
As much as I hate AIX, the Power5 machines are SWEET at the high end.
But this crowd is about 1-4 way machines. Sun offers no reasonable 1Us (V120: 700Mhz Ultra 2 CPUs? with no cache to speak of? Cmon. My abay Wait, looking at Sun they have a 2*1GHz V240 Ultra3 box for "only" $6k. Add a RAID box and you can compete with the $4 DL380g3 (at 3GHz, but only 32bit :).
But Sun ships with apache 1.3.12 and other never updated Open Source Tools...
Thanks to PowerMacs with G5s (first 130nm release of the PPC 970) and Serial ATA Virginia Tech have the third supercomputer of the World...
;-)
And your loved very cool Sun systems?
Apple is NOT the new Sun: Apple is only Apple; now, Sun is NOTHING!!!
..I have one as well that I use in a stereo rack playing MP3s via iTunes. Its exceptionally fun now that I have a bluetooth dongle and can skip through all the songs with Salling Clicker from my Tungsten T3.
;)
All the turbo geeky goodness.
Read the article again; you're paying for the Active Directory interoperability, Open Directory integration, and the GUI admin tools. Since an Xserve just might be the most cost effective hardware (unless you're allergic to IDE drives or something), let's just look at just the OS costs vs Open Source and call OS X Server $995 and ignore support. The Open Source distro is free, $0.00.
At your usual consulting rate, for $995.00 - do you get to your favorite bar just as happy hour starts celebrating a job well done, or are you onsite all week ? And, in that time, could you properly configure all those Open Source tools and provide an administration interface comparable to Apple's ?
If the Open Source solution can be configured for less than $995 in labor (allowing for setup time in OS X as well) then OS X is cost effective. If an Open Source solution can be put in place and be a better value, then go with that [1]. If it's a zealotry thing I'll be happy to bid against you.
[1] Yes, in a real world example hardware costs would be given a LOT more attention.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
At least two friends have complained that OSX Server's Apache/Web GUI has trashed their carefully hand-crafted apache configurations without warning.
+++OK ATH
Apple is pretty smart. They know that Apple buyers really do care just how slick their server will look locked up in that rackroom or rack cabinet.
Coming from a job where the Director of Tech was an apple lover and made IT dept buy an XServe, I had a chance to play with it. Really unimpressed for the cost. All of the GUI apps had free and usually more featureful linux counterparts . Most of the time the admins did their work in the command line anyway.
When the controller and the ceo found out that we could have bought and built out three x86 boxes running linux for less, the DT was put on the short list and three months later was audited and fired. When it came down to it, there really was no ROI going with the X boxes. A flashy GUI? I'd personally fire anyone who bought server hardware based on that.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
Whoah.
:D
Looks like I can actually get some use out of The Collection. I acquired two each of 6100, 7100, and 8100s and they've been gathering dust in the basement.... and 6100s are evil little pizza boxes.
ph34r.
I've taken my three button USB mouse from my SGI 320 and stuck it on one of my OSX machine a while back and it worked just great. It understands all the three button functions correctly out of the box in X11 and other applications without any drivers or any additional cofiguration. Apple DOES support multi-button mice. In Expose' you can program even ask a four or five button mouse to use certain functions. I now use a IBM scrool wheel mouse made for PCs. The CD did not come with a driver for OSX, but I plugged it into my OSX G4 Powerbook and now I use the fourth mouse button used by the thumb to activate the same function as F10 in Expose.
Servers aren't supposed to be playing movies, or capturing pictures. What you're describing is done by what's called a Workstation. Let me explain:
Server: DNS,DHCP,FTP,HTTP,SMB,NFS, you know, stuff a server is supposed to do. Throughput intensive operations mostly.
Workstation: The box you sit your fat ass in front of and get work done, like editing movies, or documents, or fooling around with some bastardized XML called AppleScript. Mostly processor intensive operations.
First I like the report and wait for part 2 (3??). /etc.
To sum up a reply to a lot of the posts here, you should compare an X-Serve with SUN or IBM boxes and the respective OS, or even Windows Server (whatever it may be called at the time of this writing). The X-Serve with unlimited User license out of the box gives the aforementioned systems a run for the money, verbatim.
About a year ago I gave the system a shot and installed Oracle 9i R2 and QuickTime Streaming Server to see how the box performs. I didn't manage to get the CPU load over 60 % while doing three audio streams, users connected to the fileshares (Mac and Windows) and running Oracle with load. The setup was painless and I switched between GUI and CLI to see if it makes a difference. The only thing I could really complain about, but that holds true to some Linux distros as well, is the fact that some GUI tools mess up the config files in
BTW: I'm a Unix SysAdmin for 17 years by now and went through *NIX systems some of you might not even heard of.
my 2 cents
I agree totally!! If I had been able to choose a wireless solution when I wired my house with CAT 5 I sure as shit would have!
Luckily I did not have to pay for the cable (the local cable company built a new building and chucked about a mile or more of the stuff..), so I snagged as much as I could. I still have about 1200 feet of it in my garage... But anyway, the running of the cable was a pain in the ass (ever do a wall fish up a floor?), and I still have a bunch of the stuff exposed although hidden as best as I can.
Hey man I understand being cheap! Other wise why would I dumpster dive for ethernet cable? But sweet Jesus how much is my time worth? My very, very, very LIMITED free time? There are a lot of other things I would like to do with my weekend then run cable.
No disrespect to Apple, but currently OS X is as optimized for 64-bit computing as OSes 8&9 were optimized for PowerPC.
You could have more applications loaded in memory, but each of them AFAIK could still address only 2GB of RAM.
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Linux has become tremendously popular in the enterprise partly because it is a cheap alternative for an edge operating system. Now, Linux is also maturing into the truly business critical server market, and has for some time.
For a business with perhaps 10-20 employees, an Xserve would do nicely! And - guess what - in many countries, that is a large number of companies. A 4-processor hot-swappable box is too big and too expensive for those companies. What they want is a server to run their mail, and to be their fileserver.
Otherwise, the real savings lie in finding suitable web applications hosted elsewhere.
Stop the brainwash
i was curious, so i ran the experiment. my numbers, at least on OS X Server, are quite different. like, a ton different. it's quite curious. observe:
/usr/bin/* /bin/* /usr/sbin/* /sbin/* 2>/dev/null | fgrep OpenBSD | wc -l
16
: cider;ident /usr/bin/* /bin/* /usr/sbin/* /sbin/* 2>/dev/null | fgrep FreeBSD | wc -l
65
: cider;ident /usr/bin/* /bin/* /usr/sbin/* /sbin/* 2>/dev/null | fgrep NetBSD | wc -l
20
: cider;ident
also interesting is the fact that running the same experiment on my Panther PowerBook yields almost exactly the numbers you saw (my NetBSD count is 145; other two are spot on). i've got no idea what this says, but i found it pretty interesting.
note also that apple's own claim is that the system is mostly FreeBSD-based, with bits pulled in from [Open,Net]BSD, as well. they're not hiding anything.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
Yes, this OS X stuff does look like a zealotry thing. That's almost certainly why it persists. But you are still paying extra for brand loyalty and spraypaint.
Once again, text files beat the crap out of your 'administrative interface.' Both in raw speed, simplicity and ability to transfer between sites for setup speed. Yes, less lickable. I don't consider that a deciding factor.
Commoditized hardware is cheaper - a lot cheaper. The G5 box may be powerful, but it's not going to be more powerful than the three Athlon XP boxes I could put in place for the same price. Yes, less anodized aluminum and bevelled edges. I don't consider that a deciding factor.
If you keep Server Admin running a lot, it will fill up /var/spool/cups/tmp with a lot of files that don't disappear. Not necessarily on the server, but on whatever machine you're running Server Admin. If you leave it running for a while (days), you'll start to notice a GB or two missing.
Just sudo rm -rf /var/spool/cups/tmp to fix it.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
It does.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Well before OSX had the Active Directory services plugin we paid a consultant over $5000 to integrate the systems and the end-product was WAY below acceptable levels. Buying the farm from Apple lets our system 'just work' without the headache of months of project labor on my part. I've got a lot of other things on my plate, I'm willing to front up the money for the lickable GUI for the streaming server, the AD integration, Workgroup Manager, the native server monitoring tools, print drivers that I don't have to 'foomatic' myself, support from Apple if I need it, and a system that's the same on our server as it is on the desktop.
Now I'm a UNIX guy by all means, I'm using the CLI quite a bit to get things done on these systems, but I would have NO IDEA how to get the server to feed the Active Directory here to the Macintosh clients if it weren't for OS X Server. The investment in 10.3 server has paid for itself in weeks just in savings in consulting fees, ARD lets me do software repairs on machines across campus (often in in-session classrooms) from my office, that's worth a lot in sub-zero temperatures or sweltering heat (Boston area).
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
No one cares cause it is Mac, and as far as i know no one gives a darn about Macs Faitfully servering PC's everywhere Joel
holdendeb didn't mention exactly which HP Smart Array controller his company was getting in those "cheap" DL380's. Considering that a 6404 is over $2k by itself, and the 6402 is over $1100, it's probably not the top of the line. Matter of fact, it is more than likely that it is the basic (discontinued) Smart Array 5i which goes for around $300. That's a dual channel Ultra 160 controller. But let's give him the benefit of the doubt that it is a Smart Array 642 with dual Ultra320 SCSI busses and PCI-X interface which sells for over $700.
While that SCSI controller might be able to do a sustained transfer for 320 megabytes per second on each bus, that's not the total throughput. Remember that with a 3 drive RAID-5 array, you have to write 150% the size of the original data - and the RAID controller has to calculate what to write - it is not as simple as just passing the data blocks onward. The bottleneck is usually the RAID controller - it can't keep up. Further, you then have the overhead of the SCSI bus arbitration - better hope he's using both channels and not all on one. Even if there is only one drive, the controller and the target still have to spend time on arbitration. His I/O's per second will probably be decent and his read performance will be good, but his write throughput will suck and the cost of the drives for the capacity will suck. I've used enough of these things to not buy into the SCSI RAID marketing literature anymore - ATA/SATA on the low end, pure FC on the high end + centralized storage where it makes sense.
'...The G5 box may be powerful, but... ....three Athlon XP boxes I could put in place for the same price...'
;)
At first, nice to see that comparing goes to 3:1
At second - show that in digits, or it'll be just a '...zealotry thing.'
With the Mac servers being so intuitive to use, Apple really has the advantage in Total Cost of Ownership.
They just haven't marketed this advantage in the server world enough.
Anonymous Coward autoparody, where's the content in *your* post? All you've got is bitter namecalling. My reasonable analysis of Apple's Server marketing and its utility is for the benefit of those questions asked, to which I respond. What's your axe to grind?
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make install -not war
Workgroup Manager uses a lot of terminology that is completely lost on me, and I am not managing any users, really.
You've just missed the boat. User management is the biggest reason to buy an OS X server.
Lots of companies run mixed environments. Here at the school we run Windows, Linux, and OS X. Having our windows domain controllers replicate user lists to OS X servers is a huge deal. Who wants to add 50 new users to three separate systems?
-ted
Jackass!
Basically, if all things are equal in terms of the features you need, the huge advantage over AD (and other directory servers) that Open Directory has that it includes no per client charge. $1000 gets you unlimited users.
If you are above artificial product differentiation, then next time I'm standing behind you in the airport and they offer free upgrades to first class, you will step aside correct?
Apple makes "the computer for the rest of us". The original vision of the Mac is a "home computer", an info "appliance" like a toaster, not like the mainframes still dominant in 1984 when it was introduced. $1000 toasters are really styled, so is the Mac. Watch the original Mac "1984" ads, and realize that computers then, in the public imagination, were the province of whitecoated lab techs. Steve Jobs has been selling us on "a computer in every garage" with his high-tech/high-touch designs which appeal to our human desires. The intelligent designs under the hood also reflect Apple's long-term service warranties, since the beginning, that keep maintenance costs low, so increase profitability of business units like AppleCare, and keep customers loyal with solid, infrequent service. And girls like Macs, so they make them cute.
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make install -not war