5 ms·

I guess (as a linux junkie) I don't see the draw of using a Mac as a server. Anyone care to share their likes/dislikes of OS X Server?

freebsd_dude 17y ago
I dont think Mac OS X server is really anything special - Mac OS X itself can be a good server. Unless your using some specific Apple-only technology like Xgrid, plain OSX is fine. And Id only use OSX as a server over linux/bsd if you really want a GUI to administer your server as opposed to command line. The GUI really is the draw of OS X generally over Linux.
blasdel 17y ago
As a hacker who had 3-4 xServes for several years, do not run OS X Server by choice. If you need your server app to run on OS X because you are making some crazy decisions in your life, use the standard client OS X. The Server version adds bullshit and pain, and doesn't remove any of the standard Desktop bullshit. The only bad thing about xServes is that Apple doesn't support running the standard OS X on them! If by hook or by crook you find yourself as a developer running OS X Server, do not use the built-in Apache or any of that shit. Compile it all yourself with MacPorts, and manage it as if it were just another unix box. The only Apple provided services you should use are SSH, NFS, SMB, and NetBoot. I was mostly running them for NetBoot (doable from Linux, but it's already enough of a PiTA on big heterogenous networks), and because it was the most politically viable means to have root on some non-CS servers at my school -- otherwise they'd be Windows or old RHEL, domesticated into the domain, with storage on an anemic SAN, and probably virtualized to death. As a sole server for a small business, it would not actually be too bad, as long as you weren't trying to host real webapps from it using the included Apache, and didn't really try to use the OpenDirectory stuff. The file sharing stuff works, Mail/Calendar/Contacts server stuff is pretty well done, and the Wiki server is fucking fantastic -- I saw it demoed at a Leopard tech talk in December 2006 and still haven't seen a better rich text editing interface in a browser. Unfortunately nobody used it because they stuck with 10.4 Server as the core OS in 10.5 Server was riddled with regressions (I've heard 10.6 Server is a brand new day)
- sailormoon 17y ago
  I had an app that needed to take snapshots of web pages, and the client was very picky about the image quality. OSX exposes WebKit in such a way that I could get very nice snapshots, and I could never get anything close on Linux so a mac was the tool of choice. It sat there doing absolutely nothing besides running a web service that would occasionally take a pic of a web page and hand it back to the real linux server, and it did that fine for a long time. I think the main issue I had was with software update. Apple provides an interactive command line interface to their update program so you could write some scripts to do it but in practise I just did it manually every once in a while. A couple of times it didn't reboot cleanly and got stuck on a firmware update or something so a manual power cycle was in order. I also had a couple of weird problems where the machine would become unresponsive if it hadn't been rebooted for a long time. Never really got to the bottom of that but it would be something to consider if you were going to use them "seriously".
  - vog 17y ago
    WebKit is part of Qt and thus available for any platform. Or did I miss something?
    - blasdel 17y ago
      The Qt version (and Chrome's version) uses the platform to do the font rendering, which on everything but OS X and Windows would be freetype. If the client wanted Apple's particular font rendering, they'd have to use their version of Webkit. The least-shitty way to do that is to write a Webkit app for OS X (there's also the Windows version of Safari, but that would involve a lot of bullshit)
      - sailormoon 17y ago
        Yep, that's exactly it. Didn't even have to write an app - I used this excellent tool: http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/
    - 17y ago
randallsquared 17y ago
To be clear, these Mac Minis are running regular OS X, not OS X Server. I bought one of these back when they first started, using PPC Mac Minis, and everything was as advertised. My motivation at the time was basically just to see if there were any major advantages to using OS X on the server, over Linux (I was using and still use CentOS and Debian on other servers). I didn't really find any such advantages, so after the contract was finished, I had them send me the Mac Mini.
patrickgzill 17y ago
I found it a pain to use, in that file locations etc. are different from both Linux and Solaris; the management apps weren't all that special either - I ended up using the command line to automate things. I think the main attraction would be for folks that already have a lot of Mac systems.
cliveholloway 17y ago
I have direct experience right now - from a management POV, it's like the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser in HHGTTG - it create an operating system almost but not quite entirely unlike Linux. The costs involved in working out why tool X isn't compiling as expected far outweigh the benefits of the cheap hardware. The sooner I get this system migrated off these damn boxes the better...

freebsd_dude 17y ago

I dont think Mac OS X server is really anything special - Mac OS X itself can be a good server. Unless your using some specific Apple-only technology like Xgrid, plain OSX is fine. And Id only use OSX as a server over linux/bsd if you really want a GUI to administer your server as opposed to command line. The GUI really is the draw of OS X generally over Linux.

blasdel 17y ago

As a hacker who had 3-4 xServes for several years, do not run OS X Server by choice. If you need your server app to run on OS X because you are making some crazy decisions in your life, use the standard client OS X. The Server version adds bullshit and pain, and doesn't remove any of the standard Desktop bullshit. The only bad thing about xServes is that Apple doesn't support running the standard OS X on them! If by hook or by crook you find yourself as a developer running OS X Server, do not use the built-in Apache or any of that shit. Compile it all yourself with MacPorts, and manage it as if it were just another unix box. The only Apple provided services you should use are SSH, NFS, SMB, and NetBoot. I was mostly running them for NetBoot (doable from Linux, but it's already enough of a PiTA on big heterogenous networks), and because it was the most politically viable means to have root on some non-CS servers at my school -- otherwise they'd be Windows or old RHEL, domesticated into the domain, with storage on an anemic SAN, and probably virtualized to death. As a sole server for a small business, it would not actually be too bad, as long as you weren't trying to host real webapps from it using the included Apache, and didn't really try to use the OpenDirectory stuff. The file sharing stuff works, Mail/Calendar/Contacts server stuff is pretty well done, and the Wiki server is fucking fantastic -- I saw it demoed at a Leopard tech talk in December 2006 and still haven't seen a better rich text editing interface in a browser. Unfortunately nobody used it because they stuck with 10.4 Server as the core OS in 10.5 Server was riddled with regressions (I've heard 10.6 Server is a brand new day)

sailormoon 17y ago
I had an app that needed to take snapshots of web pages, and the client was very picky about the image quality. OSX exposes WebKit in such a way that I could get very nice snapshots, and I could never get anything close on Linux so a mac was the tool of choice. It sat there doing absolutely nothing besides running a web service that would occasionally take a pic of a web page and hand it back to the real linux server, and it did that fine for a long time. I think the main issue I had was with software update. Apple provides an interactive command line interface to their update program so you could write some scripts to do it but in practise I just did it manually every once in a while. A couple of times it didn't reboot cleanly and got stuck on a firmware update or something so a manual power cycle was in order. I also had a couple of weird problems where the machine would become unresponsive if it hadn't been rebooted for a long time. Never really got to the bottom of that but it would be something to consider if you were going to use them "seriously".
- vog 17y ago
  WebKit is part of Qt and thus available for any platform. Or did I miss something?
  - blasdel 17y ago
    The Qt version (and Chrome's version) uses the platform to do the font rendering, which on everything but OS X and Windows would be freetype. If the client wanted Apple's particular font rendering, they'd have to use their version of Webkit. The least-shitty way to do that is to write a Webkit app for OS X (there's also the Windows version of Safari, but that would involve a lot of bullshit)
    - sailormoon 17y ago
      Yep, that's exactly it. Didn't even have to write an app - I used this excellent tool: http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/ http://www.paulhammond.org/webkit2png/
  - 17y ago

randallsquared 17y ago

To be clear, these Mac Minis are running regular OS X, not OS X Server. I bought one of these back when they first started, using PPC Mac Minis, and everything was as advertised. My motivation at the time was basically just to see if there were any major advantages to using OS X on the server, over Linux (I was using and still use CentOS and Debian on other servers). I didn't really find any such advantages, so after the contract was finished, I had them send me the Mac Mini.

patrickgzill 17y ago

I found it a pain to use, in that file locations etc. are different from both Linux and Solaris; the management apps weren't all that special either - I ended up using the command line to automate things. I think the main attraction would be for folks that already have a lot of Mac systems.

cliveholloway 17y ago

I have direct experience right now - from a management POV, it's like the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser in HHGTTG - it create an operating system almost but not quite entirely unlike Linux. The costs involved in working out why tool X isn't compiling as expected far outweigh the benefits of the cheap hardware. The sooner I get this system migrated off these damn boxes the better...