25 ms·

Apple Discontinues macOS Server

587 points by sharjeelsayed 4y ago

kolencherry 4y ago
Apple also discontinued the MDM product they acquired (Fleetsmith) today. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213238 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213238
- andreasley 4y ago
  Interesting. I suppose the strategy is to get everyone to use Apple Business Essentials (https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/ https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/), which isn't yet available outside of the US.
  - ghostly_s 4y ago
    Is ABE not built on Fleetsmith? If they have another internal MDM solution this is the first I'm hearing of it.
    - mattl 4y ago
      It is.
floatinglotus 4y ago
After the death of Xsan, this product never made sense.
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  Even with Xsan it didn’t really make sense.
  - greedo 4y ago
    Xsan was terrible when I used it. Each side of disks was unique and couldn't be aggregated into one volume, it was slow, expensive, and the software was very unreliable. I can't even count the number of support tickets I opened for this POS.
    - sabujp 4y ago
      yeah it was bad, but I eventually determined the problem was a faulty motherboard on one of our xserves by switching hardware around
- ndespres 4y ago
  It did fill a gap for a while unmet by a lot of services that we take for granted now. A Mac Mini with macOS Server to host email, calendar sharing, file sharing, and Time Machine backups went a long way towards meeting a small office's IT needs. It's mostly supplanted by things like Google Workspace, Office 365, Dropbox, and proper MDM solutions these days, but wasn't a bad choice up through maybe 2014 depending on the situation.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    Even as early as 2008, it didn’t make sense for a small company to host their own e-mail servers. Hosted Outlook was a much better choice.
    - ndespres 4y ago
      My memory of the hosted Outlook/Exchange landscape of that time is much more negative. It was expensive, had inconsistent or costly support for ActiveSync devices, had no integration or federation with existing on-premise Active Directory solutions, management consoles of shared/hosted Exchange providers were difficult to administer. Broadband was much more limited, so remotely-hosted mailboxes were a hassle.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        By 2009 at least, iPhones supported hosted ActiveSync. I was writing field service software (“sending people places to do things”) for ruggedized Windows Mobile devices. I do seem to remember some of our customers using ActiveSync from hosted Outlook for emails alongside our software.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Hosted exchange was kinda expensive and slow until Microsoft started competing directly from my experience.
- CodeWriter23 4y ago
  I think the death knell started with discontinuation of Xserve.
avalys 4y ago
I’ve never worked for Apple, but I can only imagine what a disaster their internal IT situation must be given that they use their software nearly exclusively internally but spend almost no effort on enterprise functionality or even basic stability, maintenance and documentation of the limited enterprise features that exist. The big tech company I do work for uses plenty of Apple hardware, but employs the equivalent of a mid-size startup in teams building internal solutions for gaps in the Apple stack.
- yalogin 4y ago
  This is very interesting. I never thought of the enterprise side of things. Can you tell me a bit more about what these gaps are?
  - amelius 4y ago
    The problems start with the AppleID that you have to share with colleagues ...
    - easton 4y ago
      You don't need to do that. Buy apps through Apple Business Manager, deploy via MDM. In fact, that's probably a violation of the license agreement, since purchased apps on a single Apple ID are only really supposed to be used by one person (or a family).
      - amelius 4y ago
        That seems to hold only for new versions of their hardware/software.
  - alar44 4y ago
    Everything in the enterprise env is likely MS based. Active directory, Office, fileshares, etc. I don't even try to integrate Mac's with that stuff, they are on an island.
- Macha 4y ago
physicsguy 4y ago
Was anyone actually still using this with the dearth of hardware for years?
- Animats 4y ago
  Apple sells a rackmount server.[1] It's a repackaged Mac Pro. Unclear who, if anyone, buys these. If MacOS Server is being discontinued, are those being orphaned? Or can you run the regular OS headless? [1] https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro
  - ramesh31 4y ago
    > Unclear who, if anyone, buys these. Native development shops running in-house build pipelines I imagine. But even that has completely gone to the cloud in the last 5 years.
    - dividedbyzero 4y ago
      What do the clouds use?
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Mac Minis
        dividedbyzero 4y ago
        That's wild.
  - NorwegianDude 4y ago
    That's not a server. That's just a Mac pro that can be rack mounted.
    - fredoliveira 4y ago
blahyawnblah 4y ago
What hardware does apple use in their data centers?
- true_religion 4y ago
  Linux apparently. Even Microsoft used Linux servers for some things.
  - giancarlostoro 4y ago
    The tale is that they used FreeBSD for Hotmail for like 20 years.
    - nazgulsenpai 4y ago
      Hotmail was an acquisition so that makes sense.
    - bogwog 4y ago
      Well it’s not like they’d be able to use Windows at that scale lol
      - tinus_hn 4y ago
        They actually wrote a really open paper about the things they needed to do to migrate Hotmail onto Windows servers. https://web.archive.org/web/20021021164226/http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html https://web.archive.org/web/20021021164226/http://www.securi...
    - oscargrouch 4y ago
      FreeBSD have a lower memory footprint and their network (now together with their filesystem) make it a better server than Linux if you want a better use of your network bandwidth. I love FreeBSD and would prefer to use it as my desktop instead of Linux, but for servers people should also consider FreeBSD as a great option for a better use of computational resources. (And all this even when Linux have zillions of smart people working hours and hours to optimized it which FreeBSD cannot afford to)
mattl 4y ago
I think this is because Rhapsody is finally ready and they don’t want to have two conflicting pieces of software.
- steviedotboston 4y ago
  I heard the same thing. At last!
- runjake 4y ago
  Might you mean Copland? :) Rhapsody came and gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
  - mattl 4y ago
    Nah, Apple has been working on Rhapsody in secret for the last twenty years in parallel with Mac OS X client.
    - runjake 4y ago
      I’m not sure if this is a joke, but Rhapsody is long dead. It was the code name for early macOS, back when it was mostly a Mac OS-skinned OPENSTEP. We unwisely used it in production to host NetInfo and various other services.
      - mattl 4y ago
        How dare you! Rhapsody isn’t dead ;-) Avie is still blessing us all.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- smm11 4y ago
  You took the words out of my mouth.
sgjohnson 4y ago
This product never really made sense anyway. About time. Shame that they killed Profile Manager though. Not that it matters too much.
eddieroger 4y ago
It is hard to say one couldn't see this coming. Of the few features left in Server, the only one I remained interested in was Profile Manager, and that hasn't worked right for a bit now. I'm fine with an Apple that wants to do hardware and operating systems more than software, but I wish they'd make Profile Manager-like features more available for regular people, not just Education or Business users. It would be infinitely useful to have such features for iPhones of family members who aren't so good with tech and could use a heavier hand in making sure the device is up to date and findable when lost. But I digress. I'm glad it's just ending, even if it's barely a surprise.
- EvanAnderson 4y ago
  I worked with a school district who used Profile Manager with ~200 iOS devices. Their in-house tech person got a horrified reaction from an Apple employee at an Apple event when they discussed the district's use of Profile Manager at that scale. The Apple employee seemed surprised that it worked and made it sound like it wasn't really supposed to be used for more than a handful of devices. I thought it was reasonably slick, personally, and would fit the bill for small orgs who otherwise didn't need a subscription MDM service.
  - moduspol 4y ago
    Using it several years ago, to me it sure seemed like a reference implementation of an MDM. It just lacked the robustness and flexibility that'd be required pretty quickly once you scale beyond a dozen or two devices.
  - Sirened 4y ago
    haha I remember talking to one of the engineers on the enterprise management team at WWDC back in 2015 and he was surprised that anyone used it at all. It really did work well and it did its job.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      Bit of a mismatch between what their product people thought and reality, perhaps.
haunter 4y ago
Surprised they didn't recommend Wiki.js under the Wiki section, imo it's the best modern Wiki software right now. Might not be as battle-hardened as Mediawiki but my experience it's more pleasant to use https://js.wiki/ https://js.wiki/
- eddieroger 4y ago
  There's a lot to be said for Mediawiki's battle-harened-ness. What makes this so much better, particularly when both could be spun up with just docker containers?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    MediaWiki is good if you have a public wiki. If you need to delegate permission or use an identity provider, it’s a pretty bad choice.
    - eddieroger 4y ago
      If your identity provider supports LDAP, not really. I was partially responsible for an enterprise wide installation of MediaWiki that talked to LDAP just fine, and this was over ten years ago.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        I mean, it has basic support for a private wiki and delegated auth. Just not very robust support. There are a lot of dead ends for common enterprise use cases. It’s just not really designed for this use case, and there other options that do these things better out of the box.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  I'm not familiar with this tool in particular but I'm fairly convinced now that wikis are often an anti-pattern. If you want a wiki as a loosely federated dump of knowledge then a traditional wiki is ok, but if you want it to be instructional material (e.g. "How to build GCC on the Apollo guidance computer") or a cohesive manual, then it should really be generated by something tracked in a proper git repository.
jasoneckert 4y ago
We purchased the Server app back in 2014 because it was an inexpensive and very functional MDM solution for our corporate Apple products. After all, it was only $20 and we could easily run it on a Mac Mini on our network. It worked incredibly well, but Apple really didn't evolve it much since then and we eventually ditched it entirely in 2017 for Jamf. Since then I've regarded it as a lost enterprise management opportunity for Apple.
- thetinguy 4y ago
  Apple uses jamf internally.
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    Apple uses literally everything internally.
    - imilk 4y ago
      Everything?
      - uf00lme 4y ago
        Everything.
        heyoni 4y ago
        But not nothing, right?
        dylan604 4y ago
        Nothing is part of everything
        drBonkers 4y ago
        Reddit is leaking.
alberth 4y ago
For those hoping for an M1 based server, this is the definitive signal that will not happen.
- KptMarchewa 4y ago
  Does that really matter? There are really good ARM processors right now, and biggest advantages of M1 - power efficiency - really matter more on the desktop than on server.
  - cush 4y ago
    It's exactly the opposite. A reduction in power can save millions of dollars in energy and cooling. All of the constraints and challenges of building a desktop are scaled up. This doesn't even factor in the savings in space. Real estate isn't cheap.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    A small, power efficient and quiet home server is something I’d love - extra points if the power supply is built in. I’ve tried a lot of Intel Nucs and they come close. The Nuc9 especially so, as it fits PCI cards.
    - eli 4y ago
      A Mac Mini running regular MacOS doesn't fit the bill?
      - lostlogin 4y ago
        It’s close and the 10gb networking makes it attractive. However it maxes out at 16gb ram (a Nuc 9 goes to 64) and virtualisation isn’t quite there yet I don’t think. Fusion says it supports the M1 but I don’t get good results. I’d like esxi or Proxmox on it, but could learn to live with it as is I suppose. Running a GUI when headless seems a bit crazy.
        4y ago
alt227 4y ago
What Apple need to do now is make their devices more linux-server friendly out of the box. I have scripts set up on all of my storage servers to scan for and remove .DS_Store files, as it essentially doubles the amount of files on a server which for indexing is incredibly bad. My complaints to the Mac users were usually met with replies such as 'Well if you ran Mac server that wouldnt be a problem'. Now they dont have that arguement to stand on. I am aware of the command to stop apple devices writing these files to network shares, but regularly our mac users 'forget' to run this command after setting up new profiles or upgrading OSs etc.
- eli 4y ago
  Would an endpoint management system like Jamf let you enforce that policy?
  - angulardragon03 4y ago
    Yeah you can do this with MDM, just target the com.apple.desktopservices preference domain and set DSDontWriteNetworkStores to true.
- MBCook 4y ago
  There’s a command to stop that? What is it?
  - thatoneguy 4y ago
    defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores false and reboot.
    - NorwegianDude 4y ago
      False? Did you mean true? Terrible naming on that one...
      - mypalmike 4y ago
exabrial 4y ago
self hosted will come back some day after everyone realizes that paying $1.99/mo doesn't let you disconnect costs from growth as you scale. Or at least I hope.
- PinguTS 4y ago
  It's 5 bucks here and 5 bucks there per employee. Then its Microsoft 360, Adobe Connect, and so on. At the end of the month it sums up to a complete employee pay check in addition to the employee pay check.
  - joshstrange 4y ago
    > At the end of the month it sums up to a complete employee pay check in addition to the employee pay check. Sure, there are some large companies that the total cost of subscription services would add up to the equivalent of 1 more employees paycheck but is that really so crazy? For what they get out of it in terms of not having to pay multiple IT people it seems like a pretty decent deal. Someone has to maintain/update/support/etc the tools, it's not free.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  Mobility and security concerns changed the game. “Zero trust” / BeyondCorp is a better architecture but requires competencies that are very hard to hire for. It makes it easier to justify the cost of outsourcing the backend to Microsoft or Google.
  - Melatonic 4y ago
    Just outsourcing to google or microsoft doesn't make you zero trust at all - in fact even Google itself is not fully zero trust.
atonse 4y ago
My guess is that they will expand business manager and related tools and just make it a cloud product.
- angulardragon03 4y ago
  They already have: https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/ https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/
Linda703 4y ago
[dead]
raggi 4y ago
So can we be allowed to cross build with the toolchain on non-mac hosts now please?
ohCh6zos 4y ago
I loved the old version before they took away all the features and just left profile manager.
tyiz 4y ago
Does Apple have a deal based on the 100M investment by Microsoft back in the 90ties that they won’t do any business stuff like client/server?!
tristor 4y ago
It's disappointing they're discontinuing MDM services as well. I've been using Profile Manager and Apple Configurator to manage personal devices + family devices across my extended family. Looks like I should investigate Jamf Now as a replacement based on this thread.
- wpearse 4y ago
  Take a look at Mosyle, free for up to 30 devices? I think it’s where we’re headed when we leave Profile Manager.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ksec 4y ago
133 Comments so far. No mention of Time Machine. No mention of Caching Server No mention of File Server. Three things that happens to be what I thought important apart from MDM, gets no mentions and I assume no use at all? Caching Server used to cache iCloud content as well. Never tried it with iCloud Photos though so I am not sure if it is a backup solution if Apple ever log you out of APPLE ID. This basically ends the dreams of Apple ever selling a Time Capsule with iOS backup and NAS functions.
- johnwheeler 4y ago
  The notice says > The most popular server features—Caching Server, File Sharing Server, and Time Machine Server are bundled with every installation of macOS High Sierra and later, so that even more customers have access to these essential services at no extra cost.
  - ksec 4y ago
    Oh Ok. I first read it and was expecting something like "Will continue....". For some strange reason their sentence wasn't immediately obvious to me these services are staying.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  There’s a content caching service now that doesn’t require a server: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-caching-on-mac-mchl9388ba1b/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac... Not sure about iCloud, I setup for updates at a school. File servers are commodity, legacy tech, I don’t see a need for a first party solution.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mwcampbell 4y ago
I was trying to remember where I encountered the macOS Server app before, and why I once considered buying a license. Then I recalled: https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/concepts/features/event-notifications.html#imap-features-event-notifications-applepushservice https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/concepts/features/event-notif... It's too bad that, assuming that documentation is still up to date, Apple doesn't allow smaller IMAP mail providers to integrate with the push notification service.
- hda111 4y ago
  This project seems to use the same API as Server.app to obtain the push certificate automatically and a Dovecot plugin as available as well. https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-daemon https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-daemon https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-plugin https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-plugin
- oneplane 4y ago
  You can in fact get a certificate for 99 per year and use that to generate entitlements that Apple will happily sign CSRs for. It's how we use MicroMDM.
  - ciaoben 4y ago
    Hi! I work at https://www.qboxmail.com https://www.qboxmail.com We would love to be able to send push notification to native apple Mail app for our users but we never wrapped our head around the whole certificate thing. (And Apple was... unhelpful). Would love to have support on this! Are you available? Let me know (nicolo.benigni@qboxmail.com)
    - oneplane 4y ago
      I think the best explanation (including APNS which is on top of IMAP open connections) on the certificates and key usages is described here: https://micromdm.io/blog/certificates/ https://micromdm.io/blog/certificates/ ABE and ABM both use the same technology so it's pretty much exactly how Apple intends it to be used. There used to be someone hosting a shared CA for this, but it because cumbersome to deal with third parties not loading the CRL and not using OSCP.
whydid 4y ago
I worked at a company that used the phrase "getting jamf'd" as a verb to describe when the management system broke things on your macbook. E.g., "I'll be able to test that code change in a bit, I got Jamf'd pretty hard this morning and now my build is broken..."
- ganoushoreilly 4y ago
  It happened to us with Fleetsmith too, it was great then overnight everything stopped working, which incidentally was because apple acquired them. I like Jamf'd better though, it's going into the lexicon!
- alana314 4y ago
  Carbon black for us, kills our node development environments at random
- cortesoft 4y ago
  Either we were coworkers, or every company that uses JAMF ends up with that saying. In fact, we made a slack response that would post a gif of Jeremy Jamm from Parks and Recs saying "You just got JAMFed" whenever anyone mentioned JAMF.
  - aiisjustanif 4y ago
    We definitely all came to the same conclusion of being JAMF’ed.
- unclekev 4y ago
  > I worked at a company that used the phrase "getting jamf'd" as a verb to describe when the management system broke things on your macbook. It's just a management framework - Do developers who use windows say "getting sccm'd" or "getting Intuned" when SCCM/Intune does management actions on their devices? > I got Jamf'd pretty hard this morning and now my build is broken... If the IT department is pushing stuff out through the management framework on the devices that is "breaking builds" - they are doing device management wrong. And if the IT department is pushing out Config Profiles which break things people use every day, thats more a people problem than technology/Jamf problem. (as in the IT dept are morons)
justsomehnguy 4y ago
I had a parallel timeline expeience reading the title. In my timeline the Server macOS died somewhere around trashcan Macs introduction or maybe even earlier.
radicaldreamer 4y ago
A lot of the features in macOS Server are now built into the default install for MacOS (caching server etc.) while others were discontinued long before the latest version of server came out (Wiki Server etc.)
- philistine 4y ago
  Yeah but they say Time Machine Server is an option in sharing, but it has never appeared in any of my computers at any point in time. Apple's gonna Apple.
  - weikju 4y ago
    sharing -> file sharing -> add a shared folder, and right-click it, then Advanced Options. Works very well.
    - philistine 4y ago
      WHAT DO YOU KNOW! I never right clicked a shared drive. Thank you.
robonerd 4y ago
Again? I could have sworn they discontinued this like 10-15 years ago.
- icedchai 4y ago
  I think 10-15 years was discontinuing the physical server (Xserve ? ) Also, at one point, they had a separate server OS product. They eventually changed to making the "server" an add-on package to base OS X / macOS. At any rate, very confusing.
TimTheTinker 4y ago
In the mid 2000s, it looked like there was good hope that Apple would finally make inroads into corporate IT. In addition to their professional software suites (Shake, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Aperture, Motion, etc.), they had already released XServe, which was really good by those days' standards, as well as XSan -- these products solved many of the needs of small professional creative groups. Mac OS X server's abilities to handle small offices' needs seemed like a prelude to larger things. Sadly, those hopes never really panned out. Apple is historically reticent to entering a market they aren't confident they have a good chance of dominating if they execute well, and their own growing internal use of Linux servers (and maybe other 3rd-party corporate domain/directory services, like Active Directory?) probably persuaded them to scale back their efforts around 2010.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  Apple has made huge inroads into corporate IT. How many corporate employees carry iPhones and iPads today? How many companies let employees request Mac laptops instead of Dell? The answer is: a lot more than in the mid-2000s! And even a lot more than 2010. And corporate IT changed along the way too. The idea of buying and running a “Mac server” makes as much sense as buying and running any server: not much. Corporations are migrating to cloud platforms and application-level authentication. And away from hardware servers running on a LAN.
  - TimTheTinker 4y ago
    > How many corporate employees carry iPhones and iPads today? I was referring to IT management of macOS - that was ambiguous in my post, apologies. iPhone only came in 2008, and its deployment in corporate environments is entirely dependent on iCloud (launched in 2011) and related services, which didn't really come into their own until the mid 2010s. Before the mobile revolution, it seemed (or at least some of us hoped) Apple was poising itself to capture the IT low-to-mid-market for corporate Apple desktop computers and potentially move upwards/outwards from there. Alas.
    - closeparen 4y ago
120photo 4y ago
OSX server was nice, but I saw the writing on the wall years ago when they killed xserver and other products. I learned long ago never to put long term faith in their products.
- gentle 4y ago
  ...unless it's the iPhone.
  - dijit 4y ago
    Even then they’ll change or remove connectors arbitrarily. I’m sure someone said this same thing about iPods once. I haven’t seen a new iPod in years.
    - mrcus 4y ago
      They changed their charging port once since the release in 2007 and they made one other connector change (removing the headphone jack) during those 15 years.
      - dijit 4y ago
        They also had three revisions of SIM in that period. I'm not saying I'm not 100% on board with these changes; I'm saying that it's silly to depend on another company. because even the flagship product which is very mature will either change or be discontinued quite easily.
        hedora 4y ago
        The whole industry also went through the same sim revisions. (And, with eSIM, there are now four revisions.)
    - noizejoy 4y ago
      Arguably the iPhone is an iPod with more stuff…
smm11 4y ago
I know at least one person who put OS X Server 1.2 on a G3 266 laptop, that was supposed to be running 8.6 for the business that cut the paychecks. I've still got the installer in a shoebox somewhere.
sytelus 4y ago
“Server OS” has been traditionally a scam with hardly a few differences, mainly in config, and purely targeted to milk “enterprise customers”. It’s good to see this fad going away now that these are obsolete anyway with Linux.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
forty 4y ago
(I'm not an IT person) since I see a few people mentioning Jamf: what's a good Jamf (MDM?) for Linux Laptops?
- hitpointdrew 4y ago
  What is your goal? Jumpcloud is pretty good if all you need to do is manage user accounts centrally. If you need fine grain Active Directory level control then I think you are SOL.
  - forty 4y ago
    The main goal is to ensure compliance of the setup (like make sure disk is properly encrypted), and to be able to deploy stuff (like corporate ssl certificates)
    - hitpointdrew 4y ago
      I would check out JumpCloud, I don't know that it will do all that you want, but worth looking at. It is free for 10 users or below, after that you have start paying, so easy enough to experiment with. I know it will let you have linux users and specify if they have sudo or not. I don't remember if you can do things like check if the disk is encrypted or deploy things, there really aren't many products for Desktop Linux to do such things that I am aware of. I mean if they are on the network (VPN) and you have SSH access to those machines you could always use ansible or something to install software and SSL certs.
- heffer 4y ago
  Fleet Commander with FreeIPA is as close as it gets I'd say.
gentle 4y ago
I'm not going to be at all surprised when Apple sells off their laptop division and kills their few remaining desktops. It's obvious they have no interest in anything outside of the iPhone. Even the iPad is treated like a second class citizen.
- pram 4y ago
  Uh huh, completely new laptop and desktop lineup on a completely new architecture = no interest.
pyuser583 4y ago
I was really hoping they would make something out of it. Apple can create great products.
gerdesj 4y ago
Apple does pretty clients. They are completely unable to do "enterprise" which basically means ensuring your document is where you left it last and being able to restore it if you misplace it. Oh and being reasonably sure that the right people can access your doc and no one else. Apple does profit and worrying about ACLs is not profitable. They leave all that boring nonsense to MS. They do pretty and expensive. There is of course Linux too but we are too boring and niche to worry about.
- MarcellusDrum 4y ago
  Linux has been called many things, but "boring" is a new one for me, especially when compared to Windows.
  - chakkepolja 4y ago
    I haven't significantly changed with my KDE config in an year or maybe more. It has all features I need, many which I need to install a 3rd party app on windows, and is faster than windows. I think that's as 'boring' as it gets.
  - 0des 4y ago
    I like boring.
  - movedx 4y ago
    Boring is good. Being boring in technology means you're not trying to be clever, in the "smart arse" sense, when implementing a solution. Sometimes being boring is the correct choice and the best thing for everyone, regardless of whether or not an engineer wants to have fun with something new(er).
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    It really is. People (understandably) give Linux flak when comparing it to desktop operating systems because... it's not a desktop OS. It's quite usable on the desktop, but the money/users/interest will always stay on the server side of things. For server stuff though, it's as boring as it gets. You can administrate it with a small collection of easy-to-learn, useful tools. You can license it for free and use it for literally anything you want. You can install it on any system and have a baseline expectation of functionality. You can run pretty much any server software, combination of containers/VMs, or even a selection of desktop apps that don't break through WINE. For the people who need Linux, it truly is a terribly boring OS. Even BSD has more interesting stuff going on. It's not boring in the "it runs Final Fantasy 14 out of the box" way, but it was never intended to. Conversely, try setting up an FTP server on Windows. You're in for a treat, I can assure you it won't be boring in the slightest.
incanus77 4y ago
This is sad. I used to have an Apple Certified Technical Coordinator and other official certifications when I first started out working for myself. Mac OS X Server did a lot of neat stuff. Here's an interesting Apple brochure from that time: https://www.apple.com/ca/education/docs/Apple-TrainingCertificationCatalogWeb.pdf https://www.apple.com/ca/education/docs/Apple-TrainingCertif...
political12345 4y ago
who cares ???
hankman86 4y ago
Seems like the right move to me. On-premise servers are a thing of the past, the cloud is where it’s at. And apparently, Apple feels like there’s no need for them to compete in this space (with 3rd party vendors covering what’s needed).
Melatonic 4y ago
Didnt even realize there was a server version of MacOS!
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  There was. A long time ago. After OS X Snow Leopard, starting with Lion (in 2010) "macOS Server" was just an app, with an increasingly shrinking feature set. The current version of "macOS Server" really didn't do much more than extremely basic MDM and Directory.
YATA1 4y ago
What do Apple and large Apple shops do for identity management? Active Directory? OpenLDAP? FreeIPA?
canbus 4y ago
Does that mean their own servers run on Linux?
- mrweasel 4y ago
  Everything I've been able to find has been about iCloud, but what I want to know is: "How do Apple manage their internal IT?" I find it hard to believe that everyone at Apple are just managing their own devices and use iCloud for filesharing. They might, but it seems weird if they don't have a need to at least some internal servers, where they'd be forced to run either Windows, Linux or some BSD. For device managing I guess they could be using their MDM service.
  - connordoner 4y ago
    They use Box.com internally for file sharing, and Jamf as their MDM.
nano9 4y ago
This is a bit disappointing. Apple is uniquely equipped to disrupt enterprise/datacenter, having the M1 chip in their arsenal. Among many other benefits, the M1 chip in the datacenter would result in massive PUE reduction. It would also bring about some healthy competition, as currently Intel and AMD are making money hand over fist with what they charge their enterprise customers. Perhaps Apple felt that Linux is too advanced nowadays, and that their BSD internals would need significant work just to catch up. It's a real shame.
willfiveash 4y ago
I'm not sad to see it go. What I vaguely remember about macOS Server was that macOS upgrades were fraught regarding whether the macOS Server would function normally afterward requiring me spending time trying to debug what was wrong. Since macOS eventually started offering some of those services, like Time Machine Server, natively I've been using those successfully. For the services macOS doesn't offer I now have the option of using Home Brew to install those services.
jrnichols 4y ago
This was sad to read for some of us old AppleShare IP era types. But yeah, the “Server” app has been flaky and seemed abandoned for ages now. It was nice to see them give a list of alternatives, though.

587 points by sharjeelsayed 4y ago

Apple also discontinued the MDM product they acquired (Fleetsmith) today. Source: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213238 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213238

andreasley 4y ago
Interesting. I suppose the strategy is to get everyone to use Apple Business Essentials (https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/ https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/), which isn't yet available outside of the US.
- ghostly_s 4y ago
  Is ABE not built on Fleetsmith? If they have another internal MDM solution this is the first I'm hearing of it.
  - mattl 4y ago
    It is.

floatinglotus 4y ago

After the death of Xsan, this product never made sense.

sgjohnson 4y ago
Even with Xsan it didn’t really make sense.
- greedo 4y ago
  Xsan was terrible when I used it. Each side of disks was unique and couldn't be aggregated into one volume, it was slow, expensive, and the software was very unreliable. I can't even count the number of support tickets I opened for this POS.
  - sabujp 4y ago
    yeah it was bad, but I eventually determined the problem was a faulty motherboard on one of our xserves by switching hardware around
ndespres 4y ago
It did fill a gap for a while unmet by a lot of services that we take for granted now. A Mac Mini with macOS Server to host email, calendar sharing, file sharing, and Time Machine backups went a long way towards meeting a small office's IT needs. It's mostly supplanted by things like Google Workspace, Office 365, Dropbox, and proper MDM solutions these days, but wasn't a bad choice up through maybe 2014 depending on the situation.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Even as early as 2008, it didn’t make sense for a small company to host their own e-mail servers. Hosted Outlook was a much better choice.
  - ndespres 4y ago
    My memory of the hosted Outlook/Exchange landscape of that time is much more negative. It was expensive, had inconsistent or costly support for ActiveSync devices, had no integration or federation with existing on-premise Active Directory solutions, management consoles of shared/hosted Exchange providers were difficult to administer. Broadband was much more limited, so remotely-hosted mailboxes were a hassle.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      By 2009 at least, iPhones supported hosted ActiveSync. I was writing field service software (“sending people places to do things”) for ruggedized Windows Mobile devices. I do seem to remember some of our customers using ActiveSync from hosted Outlook for emails alongside our software.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Hosted exchange was kinda expensive and slow until Microsoft started competing directly from my experience.
CodeWriter23 4y ago
I think the death knell started with discontinuation of Xserve.

avalys 4y ago

I’ve never worked for Apple, but I can only imagine what a disaster their internal IT situation must be given that they use their software nearly exclusively internally but spend almost no effort on enterprise functionality or even basic stability, maintenance and documentation of the limited enterprise features that exist. The big tech company I do work for uses plenty of Apple hardware, but employs the equivalent of a mid-size startup in teams building internal solutions for gaps in the Apple stack.

yalogin 4y ago
This is very interesting. I never thought of the enterprise side of things. Can you tell me a bit more about what these gaps are?
- amelius 4y ago
  The problems start with the AppleID that you have to share with colleagues ...
  - easton 4y ago
    You don't need to do that. Buy apps through Apple Business Manager, deploy via MDM. In fact, that's probably a violation of the license agreement, since purchased apps on a single Apple ID are only really supposed to be used by one person (or a family).
    - amelius 4y ago
      That seems to hold only for new versions of their hardware/software.
- alar44 4y ago
  Everything in the enterprise env is likely MS based. Active directory, Office, fileshares, etc. I don't even try to integrate Mac's with that stuff, they are on an island.
Macha 4y ago

physicsguy 4y ago

Was anyone actually still using this with the dearth of hardware for years?

Animats 4y ago
Apple sells a rackmount server.[1] It's a repackaged Mac Pro. Unclear who, if anyone, buys these. If MacOS Server is being discontinued, are those being orphaned? Or can you run the regular OS headless? [1] https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-pro
- ramesh31 4y ago
  > Unclear who, if anyone, buys these. Native development shops running in-house build pipelines I imagine. But even that has completely gone to the cloud in the last 5 years.
  - dividedbyzero 4y ago
    What do the clouds use?
    - scarface74 4y ago
      Mac Minis
      - dividedbyzero 4y ago
        That's wild.
- NorwegianDude 4y ago
  That's not a server. That's just a Mac pro that can be rack mounted.
  - fredoliveira 4y ago

blahyawnblah 4y ago

What hardware does apple use in their data centers?

true_religion 4y ago
Linux apparently. Even Microsoft used Linux servers for some things.
- giancarlostoro 4y ago
  The tale is that they used FreeBSD for Hotmail for like 20 years.
  - nazgulsenpai 4y ago
    Hotmail was an acquisition so that makes sense.
  - bogwog 4y ago
    Well it’s not like they’d be able to use Windows at that scale lol
    - tinus_hn 4y ago
      They actually wrote a really open paper about the things they needed to do to migrate Hotmail onto Windows servers. https://web.archive.org/web/20021021164226/http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html https://web.archive.org/web/20021021164226/http://www.securi...
  - oscargrouch 4y ago
    FreeBSD have a lower memory footprint and their network (now together with their filesystem) make it a better server than Linux if you want a better use of your network bandwidth. I love FreeBSD and would prefer to use it as my desktop instead of Linux, but for servers people should also consider FreeBSD as a great option for a better use of computational resources. (And all this even when Linux have zillions of smart people working hours and hours to optimized it which FreeBSD cannot afford to)

mattl 4y ago

I think this is because Rhapsody is finally ready and they don’t want to have two conflicting pieces of software.

steviedotboston 4y ago
I heard the same thing. At last!
runjake 4y ago
Might you mean Copland? :) Rhapsody came and gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copland_(operating_system)
- mattl 4y ago
  Nah, Apple has been working on Rhapsody in secret for the last twenty years in parallel with Mac OS X client.
  - runjake 4y ago
    I’m not sure if this is a joke, but Rhapsody is long dead. It was the code name for early macOS, back when it was mostly a Mac OS-skinned OPENSTEP. We unwisely used it in production to host NetInfo and various other services.
    - mattl 4y ago
      How dare you! Rhapsody isn’t dead ;-) Avie is still blessing us all.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
smm11 4y ago
You took the words out of my mouth.

sgjohnson 4y ago

This product never really made sense anyway. About time. Shame that they killed Profile Manager though. Not that it matters too much.

eddieroger 4y ago

It is hard to say one couldn't see this coming. Of the few features left in Server, the only one I remained interested in was Profile Manager, and that hasn't worked right for a bit now. I'm fine with an Apple that wants to do hardware and operating systems more than software, but I wish they'd make Profile Manager-like features more available for regular people, not just Education or Business users. It would be infinitely useful to have such features for iPhones of family members who aren't so good with tech and could use a heavier hand in making sure the device is up to date and findable when lost. But I digress. I'm glad it's just ending, even if it's barely a surprise.

EvanAnderson 4y ago
I worked with a school district who used Profile Manager with ~200 iOS devices. Their in-house tech person got a horrified reaction from an Apple employee at an Apple event when they discussed the district's use of Profile Manager at that scale. The Apple employee seemed surprised that it worked and made it sound like it wasn't really supposed to be used for more than a handful of devices. I thought it was reasonably slick, personally, and would fit the bill for small orgs who otherwise didn't need a subscription MDM service.
- moduspol 4y ago
  Using it several years ago, to me it sure seemed like a reference implementation of an MDM. It just lacked the robustness and flexibility that'd be required pretty quickly once you scale beyond a dozen or two devices.
- Sirened 4y ago
  haha I remember talking to one of the engineers on the enterprise management team at WWDC back in 2015 and he was surprised that anyone used it at all. It really did work well and it did its job.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Bit of a mismatch between what their product people thought and reality, perhaps.

haunter 4y ago

Surprised they didn't recommend Wiki.js under the Wiki section, imo it's the best modern Wiki software right now. Might not be as battle-hardened as Mediawiki but my experience it's more pleasant to use https://js.wiki/ https://js.wiki/

eddieroger 4y ago
There's a lot to be said for Mediawiki's battle-harened-ness. What makes this so much better, particularly when both could be spun up with just docker containers?
- kube-system 4y ago
  MediaWiki is good if you have a public wiki. If you need to delegate permission or use an identity provider, it’s a pretty bad choice.
  - eddieroger 4y ago
    If your identity provider supports LDAP, not really. I was partially responsible for an enterprise wide installation of MediaWiki that talked to LDAP just fine, and this was over ten years ago.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      I mean, it has basic support for a private wiki and delegated auth. Just not very robust support. There are a lot of dead ends for common enterprise use cases. It’s just not really designed for this use case, and there other options that do these things better out of the box.
mhh__ 4y ago
I'm not familiar with this tool in particular but I'm fairly convinced now that wikis are often an anti-pattern. If you want a wiki as a loosely federated dump of knowledge then a traditional wiki is ok, but if you want it to be instructional material (e.g. "How to build GCC on the Apollo guidance computer") or a cohesive manual, then it should really be generated by something tracked in a proper git repository.

jasoneckert 4y ago

We purchased the Server app back in 2014 because it was an inexpensive and very functional MDM solution for our corporate Apple products. After all, it was only $20 and we could easily run it on a Mac Mini on our network. It worked incredibly well, but Apple really didn't evolve it much since then and we eventually ditched it entirely in 2017 for Jamf. Since then I've regarded it as a lost enterprise management opportunity for Apple.

thetinguy 4y ago
Apple uses jamf internally.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  Apple uses literally everything internally.
  - imilk 4y ago
    Everything?
    - uf00lme 4y ago
      Everything.
      - heyoni 4y ago
        But not nothing, right?
        dylan604 4y ago
        Nothing is part of everything
        drBonkers 4y ago
        Reddit is leaking.

alberth 4y ago

For those hoping for an M1 based server, this is the definitive signal that will not happen.

KptMarchewa 4y ago
Does that really matter? There are really good ARM processors right now, and biggest advantages of M1 - power efficiency - really matter more on the desktop than on server.
- cush 4y ago
  It's exactly the opposite. A reduction in power can save millions of dollars in energy and cooling. All of the constraints and challenges of building a desktop are scaled up. This doesn't even factor in the savings in space. Real estate isn't cheap.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  A small, power efficient and quiet home server is something I’d love - extra points if the power supply is built in. I’ve tried a lot of Intel Nucs and they come close. The Nuc9 especially so, as it fits PCI cards.
  - eli 4y ago
    A Mac Mini running regular MacOS doesn't fit the bill?
    - lostlogin 4y ago
      It’s close and the 10gb networking makes it attractive. However it maxes out at 16gb ram (a Nuc 9 goes to 64) and virtualisation isn’t quite there yet I don’t think. Fusion says it supports the M1 but I don’t get good results. I’d like esxi or Proxmox on it, but could learn to live with it as is I suppose. Running a GUI when headless seems a bit crazy.
      - 4y ago

alt227 4y ago

What Apple need to do now is make their devices more linux-server friendly out of the box. I have scripts set up on all of my storage servers to scan for and remove .DS_Store files, as it essentially doubles the amount of files on a server which for indexing is incredibly bad. My complaints to the Mac users were usually met with replies such as 'Well if you ran Mac server that wouldnt be a problem'. Now they dont have that arguement to stand on. I am aware of the command to stop apple devices writing these files to network shares, but regularly our mac users 'forget' to run this command after setting up new profiles or upgrading OSs etc.

eli 4y ago
Would an endpoint management system like Jamf let you enforce that policy?
- angulardragon03 4y ago
  Yeah you can do this with MDM, just target the com.apple.desktopservices preference domain and set DSDontWriteNetworkStores to true.
MBCook 4y ago
There’s a command to stop that? What is it?
- thatoneguy 4y ago
  defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores false and reboot.
  - NorwegianDude 4y ago
    False? Did you mean true? Terrible naming on that one...
    - mypalmike 4y ago

exabrial 4y ago

self hosted will come back some day after everyone realizes that paying $1.99/mo doesn't let you disconnect costs from growth as you scale. Or at least I hope.

PinguTS 4y ago
It's 5 bucks here and 5 bucks there per employee. Then its Microsoft 360, Adobe Connect, and so on. At the end of the month it sums up to a complete employee pay check in addition to the employee pay check.
- joshstrange 4y ago
  > At the end of the month it sums up to a complete employee pay check in addition to the employee pay check. Sure, there are some large companies that the total cost of subscription services would add up to the equivalent of 1 more employees paycheck but is that really so crazy? For what they get out of it in terms of not having to pay multiple IT people it seems like a pretty decent deal. Someone has to maintain/update/support/etc the tools, it's not free.
snowwrestler 4y ago
Mobility and security concerns changed the game. “Zero trust” / BeyondCorp is a better architecture but requires competencies that are very hard to hire for. It makes it easier to justify the cost of outsourcing the backend to Microsoft or Google.
- Melatonic 4y ago
  Just outsourcing to google or microsoft doesn't make you zero trust at all - in fact even Google itself is not fully zero trust.

atonse 4y ago

My guess is that they will expand business manager and related tools and just make it a cloud product.

angulardragon03 4y ago
They already have: https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/ https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/

Linda703 4y ago

[dead]

raggi 4y ago

So can we be allowed to cross build with the toolchain on non-mac hosts now please?

ohCh6zos 4y ago

I loved the old version before they took away all the features and just left profile manager.

tyiz 4y ago

Does Apple have a deal based on the 100M investment by Microsoft back in the 90ties that they won’t do any business stuff like client/server?!

tristor 4y ago

It's disappointing they're discontinuing MDM services as well. I've been using Profile Manager and Apple Configurator to manage personal devices + family devices across my extended family. Looks like I should investigate Jamf Now as a replacement based on this thread.

wpearse 4y ago
Take a look at Mosyle, free for up to 30 devices? I think it’s where we’re headed when we leave Profile Manager.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ksec 4y ago

133 Comments so far. No mention of Time Machine. No mention of Caching Server No mention of File Server. Three things that happens to be what I thought important apart from MDM, gets no mentions and I assume no use at all? Caching Server used to cache iCloud content as well. Never tried it with iCloud Photos though so I am not sure if it is a backup solution if Apple ever log you out of APPLE ID. This basically ends the dreams of Apple ever selling a Time Capsule with iOS backup and NAS functions.

johnwheeler 4y ago
The notice says > The most popular server features—Caching Server, File Sharing Server, and Time Machine Server are bundled with every installation of macOS High Sierra and later, so that even more customers have access to these essential services at no extra cost.
- ksec 4y ago
  Oh Ok. I first read it and was expecting something like "Will continue....". For some strange reason their sentence wasn't immediately obvious to me these services are staying.
Spooky23 4y ago
There’s a content caching service now that doesn’t require a server: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-caching-on-mac-mchl9388ba1b/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac... Not sure about iCloud, I setup for updates at a school. File servers are commodity, legacy tech, I don’t see a need for a first party solution.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mwcampbell 4y ago

I was trying to remember where I encountered the macOS Server app before, and why I once considered buying a license. Then I recalled: https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/concepts/features/event-notifications.html#imap-features-event-notifications-applepushservice https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/concepts/features/event-notif... It's too bad that, assuming that documentation is still up to date, Apple doesn't allow smaller IMAP mail providers to integrate with the push notification service.

hda111 4y ago
This project seems to use the same API as Server.app to obtain the push certificate automatically and a Dovecot plugin as available as well. https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-daemon https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-daemon https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-plugin https://github.com/freswa/dovecot-xaps-plugin
oneplane 4y ago
You can in fact get a certificate for 99 per year and use that to generate entitlements that Apple will happily sign CSRs for. It's how we use MicroMDM.
- ciaoben 4y ago
  Hi! I work at https://www.qboxmail.com https://www.qboxmail.com We would love to be able to send push notification to native apple Mail app for our users but we never wrapped our head around the whole certificate thing. (And Apple was... unhelpful). Would love to have support on this! Are you available? Let me know (nicolo.benigni@qboxmail.com)
  - oneplane 4y ago
    I think the best explanation (including APNS which is on top of IMAP open connections) on the certificates and key usages is described here: https://micromdm.io/blog/certificates/ https://micromdm.io/blog/certificates/ ABE and ABM both use the same technology so it's pretty much exactly how Apple intends it to be used. There used to be someone hosting a shared CA for this, but it because cumbersome to deal with third parties not loading the CRL and not using OSCP.

whydid 4y ago

I worked at a company that used the phrase "getting jamf'd" as a verb to describe when the management system broke things on your macbook. E.g., "I'll be able to test that code change in a bit, I got Jamf'd pretty hard this morning and now my build is broken..."

ganoushoreilly 4y ago
It happened to us with Fleetsmith too, it was great then overnight everything stopped working, which incidentally was because apple acquired them. I like Jamf'd better though, it's going into the lexicon!
alana314 4y ago
Carbon black for us, kills our node development environments at random
cortesoft 4y ago
Either we were coworkers, or every company that uses JAMF ends up with that saying. In fact, we made a slack response that would post a gif of Jeremy Jamm from Parks and Recs saying "You just got JAMFed" whenever anyone mentioned JAMF.
- aiisjustanif 4y ago
  We definitely all came to the same conclusion of being JAMF’ed.
unclekev 4y ago
> I worked at a company that used the phrase "getting jamf'd" as a verb to describe when the management system broke things on your macbook. It's just a management framework - Do developers who use windows say "getting sccm'd" or "getting Intuned" when SCCM/Intune does management actions on their devices? > I got Jamf'd pretty hard this morning and now my build is broken... If the IT department is pushing stuff out through the management framework on the devices that is "breaking builds" - they are doing device management wrong. And if the IT department is pushing out Config Profiles which break things people use every day, thats more a people problem than technology/Jamf problem. (as in the IT dept are morons)

justsomehnguy 4y ago

I had a parallel timeline expeience reading the title. In my timeline the Server macOS died somewhere around trashcan Macs introduction or maybe even earlier.

radicaldreamer 4y ago

A lot of the features in macOS Server are now built into the default install for MacOS (caching server etc.) while others were discontinued long before the latest version of server came out (Wiki Server etc.)

philistine 4y ago
Yeah but they say Time Machine Server is an option in sharing, but it has never appeared in any of my computers at any point in time. Apple's gonna Apple.
- weikju 4y ago
  sharing -> file sharing -> add a shared folder, and right-click it, then Advanced Options. Works very well.
  - philistine 4y ago
    WHAT DO YOU KNOW! I never right clicked a shared drive. Thank you.

robonerd 4y ago

Again? I could have sworn they discontinued this like 10-15 years ago.

icedchai 4y ago
I think 10-15 years was discontinuing the physical server (Xserve ? ) Also, at one point, they had a separate server OS product. They eventually changed to making the "server" an add-on package to base OS X / macOS. At any rate, very confusing.

TimTheTinker 4y ago

In the mid 2000s, it looked like there was good hope that Apple would finally make inroads into corporate IT. In addition to their professional software suites (Shake, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Aperture, Motion, etc.), they had already released XServe, which was really good by those days' standards, as well as XSan -- these products solved many of the needs of small professional creative groups. Mac OS X server's abilities to handle small offices' needs seemed like a prelude to larger things. Sadly, those hopes never really panned out. Apple is historically reticent to entering a market they aren't confident they have a good chance of dominating if they execute well, and their own growing internal use of Linux servers (and maybe other 3rd-party corporate domain/directory services, like Active Directory?) probably persuaded them to scale back their efforts around 2010.

snowwrestler 4y ago
Apple has made huge inroads into corporate IT. How many corporate employees carry iPhones and iPads today? How many companies let employees request Mac laptops instead of Dell? The answer is: a lot more than in the mid-2000s! And even a lot more than 2010. And corporate IT changed along the way too. The idea of buying and running a “Mac server” makes as much sense as buying and running any server: not much. Corporations are migrating to cloud platforms and application-level authentication. And away from hardware servers running on a LAN.
- TimTheTinker 4y ago
  > How many corporate employees carry iPhones and iPads today? I was referring to IT management of macOS - that was ambiguous in my post, apologies. iPhone only came in 2008, and its deployment in corporate environments is entirely dependent on iCloud (launched in 2011) and related services, which didn't really come into their own until the mid 2010s. Before the mobile revolution, it seemed (or at least some of us hoped) Apple was poising itself to capture the IT low-to-mid-market for corporate Apple desktop computers and potentially move upwards/outwards from there. Alas.
  - closeparen 4y ago

120photo 4y ago

OSX server was nice, but I saw the writing on the wall years ago when they killed xserver and other products. I learned long ago never to put long term faith in their products.

gentle 4y ago
...unless it's the iPhone.
- dijit 4y ago
  Even then they’ll change or remove connectors arbitrarily. I’m sure someone said this same thing about iPods once. I haven’t seen a new iPod in years.
  - mrcus 4y ago
    They changed their charging port once since the release in 2007 and they made one other connector change (removing the headphone jack) during those 15 years.
    - dijit 4y ago
      They also had three revisions of SIM in that period. I'm not saying I'm not 100% on board with these changes; I'm saying that it's silly to depend on another company. because even the flagship product which is very mature will either change or be discontinued quite easily.
      - hedora 4y ago
        The whole industry also went through the same sim revisions. (And, with eSIM, there are now four revisions.)
  - noizejoy 4y ago
    Arguably the iPhone is an iPod with more stuff…

smm11 4y ago

I know at least one person who put OS X Server 1.2 on a G3 266 laptop, that was supposed to be running 8.6 for the business that cut the paychecks. I've still got the installer in a shoebox somewhere.

sytelus 4y ago

“Server OS” has been traditionally a scam with hardly a few differences, mainly in config, and purely targeted to milk “enterprise customers”. It’s good to see this fad going away now that these are obsolete anyway with Linux.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

forty 4y ago

(I'm not an IT person) since I see a few people mentioning Jamf: what's a good Jamf (MDM?) for Linux Laptops?

hitpointdrew 4y ago
What is your goal? Jumpcloud is pretty good if all you need to do is manage user accounts centrally. If you need fine grain Active Directory level control then I think you are SOL.
- forty 4y ago
  The main goal is to ensure compliance of the setup (like make sure disk is properly encrypted), and to be able to deploy stuff (like corporate ssl certificates)
  - hitpointdrew 4y ago
    I would check out JumpCloud, I don't know that it will do all that you want, but worth looking at. It is free for 10 users or below, after that you have start paying, so easy enough to experiment with. I know it will let you have linux users and specify if they have sudo or not. I don't remember if you can do things like check if the disk is encrypted or deploy things, there really aren't many products for Desktop Linux to do such things that I am aware of. I mean if they are on the network (VPN) and you have SSH access to those machines you could always use ansible or something to install software and SSL certs.
heffer 4y ago
Fleet Commander with FreeIPA is as close as it gets I'd say.

gentle 4y ago

I'm not going to be at all surprised when Apple sells off their laptop division and kills their few remaining desktops. It's obvious they have no interest in anything outside of the iPhone. Even the iPad is treated like a second class citizen.

pram 4y ago
Uh huh, completely new laptop and desktop lineup on a completely new architecture = no interest.

pyuser583 4y ago

I was really hoping they would make something out of it. Apple can create great products.

gerdesj 4y ago

Apple does pretty clients. They are completely unable to do "enterprise" which basically means ensuring your document is where you left it last and being able to restore it if you misplace it. Oh and being reasonably sure that the right people can access your doc and no one else. Apple does profit and worrying about ACLs is not profitable. They leave all that boring nonsense to MS. They do pretty and expensive. There is of course Linux too but we are too boring and niche to worry about.

MarcellusDrum 4y ago
Linux has been called many things, but "boring" is a new one for me, especially when compared to Windows.
- chakkepolja 4y ago
  I haven't significantly changed with my KDE config in an year or maybe more. It has all features I need, many which I need to install a 3rd party app on windows, and is faster than windows. I think that's as 'boring' as it gets.
- 0des 4y ago
  I like boring.
- movedx 4y ago
  Boring is good. Being boring in technology means you're not trying to be clever, in the "smart arse" sense, when implementing a solution. Sometimes being boring is the correct choice and the best thing for everyone, regardless of whether or not an engineer wants to have fun with something new(er).
- smoldesu 4y ago
  It really is. People (understandably) give Linux flak when comparing it to desktop operating systems because... it's not a desktop OS. It's quite usable on the desktop, but the money/users/interest will always stay on the server side of things. For server stuff though, it's as boring as it gets. You can administrate it with a small collection of easy-to-learn, useful tools. You can license it for free and use it for literally anything you want. You can install it on any system and have a baseline expectation of functionality. You can run pretty much any server software, combination of containers/VMs, or even a selection of desktop apps that don't break through WINE. For the people who need Linux, it truly is a terribly boring OS. Even BSD has more interesting stuff going on. It's not boring in the "it runs Final Fantasy 14 out of the box" way, but it was never intended to. Conversely, try setting up an FTP server on Windows. You're in for a treat, I can assure you it won't be boring in the slightest.

incanus77 4y ago

This is sad. I used to have an Apple Certified Technical Coordinator and other official certifications when I first started out working for myself. Mac OS X Server did a lot of neat stuff. Here's an interesting Apple brochure from that time: https://www.apple.com/ca/education/docs/Apple-TrainingCertificationCatalogWeb.pdf https://www.apple.com/ca/education/docs/Apple-TrainingCertif...

political12345 4y ago

who cares ???

hankman86 4y ago

Seems like the right move to me. On-premise servers are a thing of the past, the cloud is where it’s at. And apparently, Apple feels like there’s no need for them to compete in this space (with 3rd party vendors covering what’s needed).

Melatonic 4y ago

Didnt even realize there was a server version of MacOS!

sgjohnson 4y ago
There was. A long time ago. After OS X Snow Leopard, starting with Lion (in 2010) "macOS Server" was just an app, with an increasingly shrinking feature set. The current version of "macOS Server" really didn't do much more than extremely basic MDM and Directory.

YATA1 4y ago

What do Apple and large Apple shops do for identity management? Active Directory? OpenLDAP? FreeIPA?

canbus 4y ago

Does that mean their own servers run on Linux?

mrweasel 4y ago
Everything I've been able to find has been about iCloud, but what I want to know is: "How do Apple manage their internal IT?" I find it hard to believe that everyone at Apple are just managing their own devices and use iCloud for filesharing. They might, but it seems weird if they don't have a need to at least some internal servers, where they'd be forced to run either Windows, Linux or some BSD. For device managing I guess they could be using their MDM service.
- connordoner 4y ago
  They use Box.com internally for file sharing, and Jamf as their MDM.

nano9 4y ago

This is a bit disappointing. Apple is uniquely equipped to disrupt enterprise/datacenter, having the M1 chip in their arsenal. Among many other benefits, the M1 chip in the datacenter would result in massive PUE reduction. It would also bring about some healthy competition, as currently Intel and AMD are making money hand over fist with what they charge their enterprise customers. Perhaps Apple felt that Linux is too advanced nowadays, and that their BSD internals would need significant work just to catch up. It's a real shame.

willfiveash 4y ago

I'm not sad to see it go. What I vaguely remember about macOS Server was that macOS upgrades were fraught regarding whether the macOS Server would function normally afterward requiring me spending time trying to debug what was wrong. Since macOS eventually started offering some of those services, like Time Machine Server, natively I've been using those successfully. For the services macOS doesn't offer I now have the option of using Home Brew to install those services.

jrnichols 4y ago

This was sad to read for some of us old AppleShare IP era types. But yeah, the “Server” app has been flaky and seemed abandoned for ages now. It was nice to see them give a list of alternatives, though.