Mac Mini Server (KICK BUTT!)

OS X Server is awful, it really doesn't work terribly well at the things it is supposed to do and 99% of the functionality is much easier to implement on a Linux box. The 1% that isn't is the Mac "Directory Services" and that really doesn't work at all.

We put an axe through the X-Serve that we bought as part of a lecture on Denial of Service attacks. The one good thing about it was the axe went very cleanly through the casing and straight through the ram modules. Much better than the Dell desktop we used the previous year which took several attempts to take down. I don't think the OS had much to do with that though.

Indeed I could have, though its difficult to know where to start. The UI is horribly processor intensive for a server OS, Windows filesharing suffers not only the usual Samba problems but couples them with the Mac-ified filesystem and all it's inherent quirks. The Active Directory integration support is poorly documented, connecting Macs to Open Directory sporadically fails for no apparent reason and significant portions of it simply do not work at all.

Given how badly Mac OS X copes with moving between networks (yes Apple, a previously unavailable DNS entry might actually resolve after you change networks! And caching the Gateway value is always going to cause problems.)  I wouldn't trust it to act as a VPN. The Web Server is just an Appleified Apache, so again you're better off just running Apache without the Apple "tweaks" that make it all the more exciting.

Add to that the fact the Server administration tools are convoluted and utterly counter-intuitive, tend to change with every release of the OS and like to "surprise and entertain" you by occasionally breaking something in a way you really weren't expecting. And woe be tide anyone who foolishly reads the OSS docs for the tools that Apple is actually using and manually configures something in the config files to get it to actually work, because then OS X will periodically decide it knows best and obliterate your settings with it's own personal selection.

Of course the last time I used it was OS X Server 10.5, maybe they've fixed all this in the new one. Somehow, I seriously doubt it. Maybe if all you ever want is a Quicktime Streaming Service then maybe, just maybe, that might work.

W3bbo said:

Ironic that you keep on touting how great WPF yet, but then put down Apple for having a server GUI that doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out (Server 2008 and 2008R2 are particularly bad examples of why Microsoft needs to hire someone in charge of UI cohesion). It's not like the Administration tools in Windows Server don't change every version either (*cough* IIS, Server Mananger, COM).

But Microsoft get Server UI. In that it really ought not be there at all. The vast majority of server components now use MMC based snap-ins, so pretty much all GUI administration tasks can be performed from the comfort of your normal desktop. Furthermore, they're moving more in the direction of stripping out UI on the actual server itself and vastly improving the interface sysadmins want, a decent command line and scripting suite.

Sure UI changes between versions but generaly not drastically (IIS being perhaps the one example and not something I was overly fond of) but by and large where they have changed it's small differences and/or moving really old tools into the MMC world to improve manageability. Server Manager, for example, is a godsend in that it consolidates a lot of functionality that was scattered all over the OS into one neat and tidy administration console.

By contrast, Apple make it nigh on impossible to do anything on OS X Server without being physically at the server console (the nearest concession you get is Apple Remote Desktop). You can't possibly script things because the Apple tools, even the monitoring ones, will quite happily obliterate any configuration you perform manually with whatever their entirely independent "configured from the GUI" settings database tells them it should be.

I don't know how much experience you've had with OS X Server, but it really doesn't get anything like the fit and finish the client GUI gets. And they'll quite happily replace one single-purpose, utterly incomprehensible UI with another single-purpose, utterly incomprehensible UI (see Netinfo Manager -> Directory Services and then compare and contrast with Active Directory)

W3bbo said:

Having worked with a few Macs in a networking environment shared with a hundred or so Linux and Windows 7 boxes, I don't know why your experience was so bad: it's cliche, but everything just seems to work with the Macs in our CS department.

In whose eyes? All our Mac owners will wax lyrical about how "it just works", but they don't have to deal with the utter mess that is trying to get policy compliance, integrate with a kerberos environment and just generally manage. The client OS is just about do-able with third party tools like Quest Authentication Services (which Apple actually recommended to us when they told us that, regardless of what the marketing material said, Active Directory integration with Leopard just doesn't work and they are phasing it out) - but even that still suffers the Apple "oh we'll just utterly break that functionality in the new version", so every new OS release becomes a case of reinventing the wheel once again.

And I'm presuming you don't really mean "a hundred or so", unless you're in a much smaller Uni than I thought; we're looking at several thousand machines here (with ~500 Windows/Mac/Linux clients in the CS department alone).

It got a lot better at stuff like that from 10.3 onwards, mostly because they removed the single big lock around kernel operations in favour of a small number of more specific locks. It's still not as good at kernel concurrency as NT, but it's heaps better than when it started.

Yes, it's the same kernel. It wasn't really until 10.3 that OS X multi-tasking was really sorted. You just tended to notice it in the server more because servers tend to be running a lot of concurrent work (particularly web servers), wheras desktop apps in that sort of era were generally very single threaded (having mostly come from the pre-OS X co-operative multitasking Mac OS).