Apple Deprecates More Services In OS X Server (apple.com)

Long-time Slashdot reader HEMI426 writes: Long ago, Apple used to produce rack servers, and a special flavor of OS X for that hardware with extra, server-friendly features. After Apple got out of the rack server game, OS X Server soldiered on, with the occasional change in cost or distribution method.

The next stop on the long, slow death march of OS X Server is here. With a recent post to their knowledgebase, Apple states that almost all of the services not necessary for the management of networked Macs and other iDevices are being deprecated. These services will be hidden for new installs, and dropped in the future.
Apple writes that "those depending on them should consider alternatives, including hosted services."

Comments

So...

[jawtheshark]

So, let me get this straight: This is a server OS, with basic server functionalities removed? In what way is this still a server OS?

Re:So...

[dgatwood]

It's a server app, with all the server functionality removed. Staring at this list, I'm struggling to think of anything that wasn't removed. Apparently, they kept the user and device management — the part that for 99% of Server.app users is the least useful, but admittedly also the only part that's at all Mac-specific.

That said, Server.app sucks. Always has. The Apache functionality has been a constant struggle even to get it to do basic things like update certs programmatically (they bizarrely store them in the keychain, then require some weird custom commands to force the server to grab the new credentials, and they're basically undocumented as far as I can tell). And heaven help you if you try to import any existing Apache config. You're pretty much guaranteed to end up with something nonfunctional.

The only reason I even install Server.app at all is so that the software updates for Apache and BIND happen without me having to pay attention to the CERT mailing lists. And even then, I don't let the app configure *anything*, using a separate launchd plist with a different identifier and a separate config file so that none of Apple's code has any effect on the actual operation of the server.

I guess with this change, there's no reason to bother installing it ever again, since I don't manage a network of users. This, of course, also means I have one less reason to keep using Macs as servers, but I digress.

Most services on the list seem to be FOSS projects

[93 Escort Wagon]

It should be easy enough to install them on your own, if for some reason you want to use a macOS box as a server.

So what?

[Yaztromo]

macOS on the Server side of things is so far behind what can be done with Linux, it isn't even funny. You can't run macOS in AWS. You can't containerize macOS apps (Docker on macOS uses macOS's hypervisor to run Linux in the background). If you want to run in the server space, and you aren't tied to Microsoft proprietary ways of doing things, Linux is the place to be. Apple knows this -- they're already too far behind, and are simply never going to be able to keep pace with what's going on in the Linux world.

Apple needs to focus on continuing to ensure that macOS is a highly compatible client OS. Linux still falls flat in this area. Other than for some Apple proprietary stuff (like iOS provisioning), a macOS server is pointless. Use Linux on the server and macOS on the client.

Yaz