3 ms·
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 craz
by 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 agoI 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 agoWebKit is part of Qt and thus available for any platform. Or did I miss something?
- blasdel 17y agoThe 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 agoYep, 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/
- sailormoon 17y agoUndoubtedly it was I who missed something! It just came down to "well, I have a working script right here for mac, or I can spend the next days/weeks/maybe never trying to get it working and looking nice on linux". I guess people don't hear "we went with the mac to save money" too often but in this case, that's what it was. But even so - I generally don't much like linux's font rendering. Doing it on mac meant that the images looked beautiful, basically exactly like Safari, which was to the client's (and my) taste.
- petercooper 17y agoI'm probably going to rig up a colocated Mac Mini to do exactly the same thing. I asked around on Twitter if other people were interested in chipping in to share the service and people were keen. There's a business opportunity here. The existing screenshot services are mostly slow (I want my imgs within a minute, ideally - not 10+), hideous quality or use browsers on operating systems with shoddy rendering. As it is, I think I can max out a Mac Mini to producing around 500-700k screenshots a day and lease a Mac Mini with the required hosting for ~$130 a month, so the costs divide down quite nicely.
- tvon 17y agoOut of curiosity, what's wrong with the included Apache?
- weaksauce 17y agoProbably because the rate of fixes to Apple bundled open source software lags behind the official source by a more than he is willing to wait. The version of apache on my 10.6 is 2.2.13 while the official version is 2.2.14(released 10-2009) which introduces bug and security fixes.