A Yahoo Mac Central article notes that, due to the new Apple OS’ support for familiar tools and services, IT managers that formerly turned up their noses at the Macs in their organizations are now embracing them. This is particularly true in organizations with a lot of Unix workstations, of course, though the efforts that Apple has made to integrate the Unix tools that make interoperability with Windows easier have benefitted OS X in Windows-heavy offices too.
I guess they didnt do much research on MacOSX’s journaled file system. AFAIK the journaling under osx actually decreases performance. And because it’s more of a hack on the hfs+ file system it still has almost the exact same features and limitations, so no larger file support either.
Interesting to hear though that Apple is finally being taken more serious, as they should be, thanks to OSX. Is anyone else using OSX in a business environment for something other than typical FCP/Adobe type apps?
That’s possible because OS X, unlike OS 9, is built on FreeBSD, an open source operating system for Intel, Alpha and PowerPC-based servers that is based on BSD Unix, an implementation of Unix developed at the University of California, Berkeley.
This misconception seems to have become deeply rooted in people’s heads. The Darwin userspace may be FreeBSD, but the kernel is certainly far from it (save for the VFS and networking)
XNU is a Mach kernel… end of story.
Darwin being based on FreeBSD is definitely not a misconception. The kernel is Mach yes but there is a large FreeBSD compatibility layer that gives OS X it’s popular Unix edge.
And the Journaling decreases harddrive performance (specifically writes) but increases boot times and reading large files can sometimes be faster or the speed difference is not noticeable. Yes I use a mac, and obviously I have a bit better grounds to be discussing the rumors and truths around the Journaling support, I also have started developing for Darwin, and it’s the differences between it and FreeBSD are usually most minimal, obviously there is a bit more there than just a cover.
Apple would support a bit more the exellent Fink project (see http://fink.sf.net ) ….
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http://islande.hirlimann.net
the kernel or the filesystem-journaling ist completely unrelevant to that topic. What are you guys talking about?
The company I work for has about 800 PC’s at our location. Our marketing has 3 Mac’s for graphic-design, html and pdf generation. These Mac’s still run OS9. Our IT-service people worked like hell to integrate these three Mac’s into our intranet infrastructure. Everything (file/print sharing, MS-Exchange Server, NT-Domain logon and SAP Client) was a problem and not solvable without third party software.
When I connect my Powerbook (OS X) to our lan, everything is a complete different story:
file/print sharing in integrated, Outlook works, Domain-login works, and the Java SAP Client runs fine.
These are the reasons why OS X Mac’s integrate smooth in Win-Nets. And not the kernel or the filesystem-journaling.
Ralf.
Double Negative MR.! This does not make me unangry!
>Is anyone else using OSX in a business environment for something other than typical FCP/Adobe type apps?<
I’m in a small researh lab (about 15 people), but i’d imagine that at least some of our needs approximate a small business. We’ve got a 3 year old iMac that runs a ton of stuff under OS-X. Using Retrospect, it backs up all our desktops to a large firewire harddrive array. It has a guest login account where i dump all the relevant software updates so i can pull them down from anywhere. FileMaker running on the machine serves our ordering database and a bunch of internal information. Finally, it serves up a low traffic website to the world at large using Apache/PHP/MySQL. Since none of these are exceptionally processor demanding, a 3 year old iMac is great for them.
It’s pretty much been trouble free. One of the coolest things was the Jaguar update. I plugged in another firewire drive and cloned the startup drive to it. I then booted a different machine with the cloned drive, performed the update there, and spent a little time making sure everything was working properly. When i was satisfied, i restarted the iMac from the cloned drive, cloned it back to the iMac’s startup disk, and then rebooted. Total downtime was just two reboots (and i could have avoided them if i really wanted to).
JT
“the kernel or the filesystem-journaling ist completely unrelevant to that topic. What are you guys talking about?”
Evidently you didn’t read the article.
“Darwin being based on FreeBSD is definitely not a misconception.”
The article doesn’t say that Darwin is based on FreeBSD. The article says that “OS X…is built on FreeBSD”, implying that the base system is, in fact, FreeBSD itself, which is definately not the case.
“The kernel is Mach yes but there is a large FreeBSD compatibility layer that gives OS X it’s popular Unix edge.”
Well, actually Mach was forked from the BSD sources. Many of the BSD-specific functions in OS X have always been present in Mach.
There aren’t any FreeBSD-specific featues in XNU that I can think of offhand except future plans for kqueue support/etc.
All the outstanding components of FreeBSD (namely the VMM) aren’t present in XNU.
This is actually _NOT_ a double negative, as “less” isn’t a negation. Less is most certainly not not more, as not more would be less or equal to. So if “less” isn’t a negation, it’s simply acting as usual on the unpopular adjective.
I think osnews shouldn’t not use double negatives in ALL of its headlines from now on.
And because it’s more of a hack on the hfs+ file system it still has almost the exact same features and limitations, so no larger file support either.
Actually, I think HFS+ does have larger file support, but some of the older APIs (Carbon…) have trouble dealing with them. It’s the same issue with filenames; older APIs can only address 32-character filenames.
As for the less unmessy title, wouldn’t “More Popular” have been so much easier? And think of it, that’s 2 bytes saved. If OSNews gets 102,400 hits, that’s 200 KB saved. Over a million 0s or 1s. Think about it.
“Mac OS X for the first time really supports standards-based enterprise qualities such as security, protocols and tools, which make management easier.”
Pretty soon they’ll start writing that the new version of Mac OS X has enterprise capabilities such as “memory”, and “programs”, and “files”.
Q: What enterprise management software (ex: Unicenter, Tivoli, OpenView) does Mac integrate with?
A: NOTHING!
Q: What enterprise features are supported by Apple’s desktop machines?
A: NONE!
Q: Does Apple offer standard UNIX to the enterprise?
A: No, as the article says, Apple offers “quasi-Unix”.
Q: What enterprise databases are currently shipping on OS X?
A: NONE!
Apple simply does not understand the enterprise. They never have. The enterprise market is not one of Apple’s core competencies. Why the media, under Apple’s incessant prodding no doubt, keeps trying to portray Apple as an enterprise company is beyond rational comprehension.
Even Apple’s Xserve computers are not being sold into “the enterprise”, but are winding up almost entirely at the sites of existing Apple customers.
What’s coming next? Apple’s iPod Enterprise Edition?
– Red Pill
“When I connect my Powerbook (OS X) to our lan, everything is a complete different story: file/print sharing in integrated, Outlook works, Domain-login works, and the Java SAP Client runs fine.”
To focus on Outlook for a moment…when did MS introduce a version of Outlook for OS X that fully works with Exchange Server? And, does this include all of the shared calendaring and meeting notice features?
when it comes to a mac a lot of people complain that have never used OS X or even a new mac. People amaze me. I have a new pc and a 3 yr old imac with OS X, I tend to stay on my mac 90 percent of the time. OS X is revolutionary then XP and xp feels much like my win 95 box. XP is solid running, but doesn’t run as fast as zippy as people say and looks cartoonish compared to OS X’s cool Aqua. OS X offers so much more then XP bottom line…
Q: What enterprise management software (ex: Unicenter, Tivoli, OpenView) does Mac integrate with?
OpenView at the moment. Others if they sell enough XServes, presumably.
Q: What enterprise features are supported by Apple’s desktop machines?
Which enterprise features do you want? They have a bunch of what i would consider “enterprise features”, but i’m not sure what you would consider essential.
Q: Does Apple offer standard UNIX to the enterprise?
It’s currently in synch with FreeBSD 4.4 – a bit behind, but pretty standard.
Q: What enterprise databases are currently shipping on OS X?
FrontBase, Sybase in beta, and Oracle9i, as of last time i checked.
Look, i get annoyed by lots of articles like this, where the authors aren’t careful with their use of terminology or use techno-gibberish. But you’re losing touch with reality by trying to claim that some careless wording by the author(s) negates very clear facts about OS-X.
JT