Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 27th Jan 2008 22:09 UTC
"Apple has brought its unique brand of richness and simplicity to servers. OS X Leopard Server is the fifth generation of the software half of Apple's server platform. This time around, Apple took what is a unique and bold approach for a Unix server. Leopard Server continues the OS X Server tradition of delivering platform-independent file/print, e-mail, Web, and network edge services (such as stateful firewall, VPN, proxy, virus, and spam filtering). But it is as easy to set up and run as a desktop. Truly; the typical Mac user could get a Leopard Server going, because the default administrative interface is a match for a Mac's System Preferences."
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Member since:
2006-01-28
The summary and the first part of the article read like a poorly done "infomercial", commenting primarily on how pretty the interface is. I think the interface is secondary on a server operating system. If the interface and the feature set are awesome, great. But a great interface does not make a great server operating system.
When we get to the meats and bones of what a server is supposed to do, here's what the author says:
"If Leopard Server has a shortcoming, it is its limited scalability. This is a legitimate concern for IT, but then IT is neither Apple's target for Leopard Server nor the most likely purchaser of turnkey, user-friendly servers. Again, Leopard Server passes muster in the general purpose category, and linking in Apple's Xsan SAN filesystem opens Leopard Server's intrinsic scalability. But the turnkey features that make Leopard Server so appealing don't scale with the use of the GUI tools. The tools themselves fall short of an experienced admin's expectations, especially with regard to real-time reporting. Apple thoughtfully made all of its admin tools operable remotely so that you don't have to resort to VNC or a remote shell; the console administrative GUI runs on any Mac client, and the tools are free. But when a remote management connection goes down mid-session, the admin tools handle it poorly. There is no notification that the link to the server has been cut. Rather, stale stats persist on-screen until the admin tool is restarted, at which point a broken connection is reported.".
And then we return to the infomercial bullshit. For instance:
" Don't base your expectations on what Windows and Linux PCs can do. Leopard is a different beast that could easily be the only collaboration server that an organization of modest size requires."
What does modest size mean in this context? What makes this more powerful than Windows or Linux, other than the fact that this guy was paid to say so?
Edited 2008-01-27 23:16 UTC