The MacOSX 10.2.4 Server Update delivers enhanced functionality and improved reliability for the following applications, services and technologies: AFP, SMB and NFS file services, DHCP, NetBoot, Open Directory, QuickTime Streaming Server, Sendmail and Workgroup Manager.It prevents Xserve drives from being unmounted while locked, provides Digest authentication for WebDAV, management of Energy Saver settings, and supports NetBoot images greater than 2 GB in size. The update also provides the latest Security Updates.
For detailed information on this Update, please visit here.
The 10.2.4 release for the desktop/workstation edition of MacOSX was released a few days ago.
apple is trying to sell a server product when their OSkernel is crap ! it is based on 20 year old mach technology. everyone knows now that microkernel is slow slow slow. the only good microkernel is l4 and even it is only good on i386 ports to ppc are sux.
meanwhile microsoft is ready to release windows server 2003 which will be much more powerful and useful. nothing in macosx works, especially the stuff that’s designed to work with windows like smb. smb is the reason for most of OS X crashes !
why anyone buys apple computer I dunno they are SLOW SLOW SLOW especially with crappy OS X microkernel. and what about SMP scalability it is also crap yet apple keeps pushing SMP macintosh because their processors are so SLOW.
apple is doomed. OS X is a bad operating system and apple just bet the farm on it. it is broke and missing basic unix features like shadow password ! good job apple replace everything with crappy netinfo and leave the passwords accessable to everyone.
why didn’t apple base their UNIX on linux instead? linux is very mature especially on ppc hardware and it’s FAST. much faster than os x on the same hardware. it really really really looks bad for apple when free OS is beating the one they spent so much money on. bad move apple.
with that said why would anyone pay for expensive apple hardware to run expensive apple server OS on when they can buy cheap PC hardware and run free Linux OS and have the SAME THING. in fact most of apple’s tools are just rebranded open source software, i.e. gnuchess => Chess.app, Samba, KHTML => Safari, cups, and all of Darwin which they just stole from BSD.
smooth move apple, I long for the day when bill gates is dancing on your grave. apple will be very dead soon.
the only way apple can’t be dead is to be like sun and swith to AMD based processor like Opteron. that will give them more power at much cheaper! people would actually buy macs then, nobody buys macs now except for stupid apple zealots who don’t know any better. why else would anybody buy shitty overpriced slow and obsolete hardware just to run crappy OSuX.
seriously, apple people rip on microsoft and windows for being crashy, but OS X is much more crashy. windows xp is 100% stable and I have never ever had it crash, lock up, or go to the blue screen of death. OS X crashes just trying to browse windows file sharing over SMB. if u leave an OS X system just sitting there doing nothing, it crashes after a few days! what the hell, isn’t it supposed to be unix? where is the stability?
apple could take a hint from Microsoft and start selling all their software for x86. the world’s biggest company is a SOFTWARE COMPANY, while all hardware companies like sun are about to go under. the real money is is software apple. sell your os x for regular pc hardware and maybe you’ll start raking in the bucks and your os won’t run like shit anymore because it will be on good hardware.
apple will never do that though because steve jobs fancies himself an arteest and thinks x86 doesn’t fit into his “grand vision” of how the world should work. well guess what steve, the whole world moved on and left you in the dust. it’s all about x86 now, ppc is dead, apple is dead, and windows is undisputed king.
r.i.p. apple, you couldn’t get with the times. when apple is dead all anyone can say is “They have only themselves to blame”
OH OH OH, that unix crap is like, 60 years old dude! it SUCKS, and that linux crap is gettin’ old too it’s like, 10 years old!@!@ and it’s based on that OLD UNIX crap!!!! [/sarcasm]
An architecture can be old and primitive, but it can evolve into something powerful, like unix did.
Wow, you’re not a troll or anything </sarcasm>
First of all, please cut out the trolling.
>why didn’t apple base their UNIX on linux instead?
Because Linux is GPL and there could be potential issues, Apple is an open company but not as extreme as GPL needs them to be. BSD is a better option for a commercial OS company who doesn’t want to open everything.
>apple is trying to sell a server product when their OSkernel is crap ! it is based on 20 year old mach technology.
So is BSD, I believe. Don’t hear you ratting on BSD. Old does not mean worse.
>why didn’t apple base their UNIX on linux instead?
Because they bought NeXT. Apple contorted OPENSTEP for OS X.
>with that said why would anyone pay for expensive apple hardware to run expensive apple server OS on when they can buy cheap PC hardware and run free Linux OS and have the SAME
THING.
You don’t get Mac Classic binary compatibility with Linux, neither do you get the Aqua UI, nor Quartz, nor Rendezvous, etc, etc, etc…
>apple could take a hint from Microsoft and start selling all their software for x86
And have Apple spend tons on trying to get driver support to work properly?
>sell your os x for regular pc hardware and maybe you’ll start raking in the bucks and your os won’t run like shit anymore because it will be on good hardware.
And you’ve argued that OS X is bad because of it’s software? Contradiction. Look, when NeXT took NeXTSTEP to the x86, it worked less well than it did under their own hardware: this is because they are able to support their own hardware better, and thus the *whole* *computer* worked together. If Apple took OS X to x86, then you’ll get less efficient drivers, less hardware integration, etc, thus OS X won’t work as well under x86 unless you really put the money under it and work at it, which I don’t think Apple is willing to afford.
> Wow, you’re not a troll or anything </sarcasm>
I was mocking the first part of rowel’s post because it was saying that architechtures are bad because they are old.
Was I that confusing? I wasnt trying to troll.
Indigo was probably replying to Rowel. That’s something these comment feature things lack, threading.
I dont think he meant you… eheh
“everyone knows now that microkernel is slow slow slow. the only good microkernel is l4 and even it is only good on i386 ports to ppc are sux.”
You seem to have quite the bone to pick with microkernel architectures. Yet, in your readily apparent ignorance, you’ve failed to notice that XNU is essentially a monolithic kernel. XNU has no Mach servers… networking and VFS are part of the kernel proper.
meanwhile microsoft is ready to release windows server 2003 which will be much more powerful and useful. nothing in macosx works, especially the stuff that’s designed to work with windows like smb. why anyone buys apple computer I dunno they are SLOW SLOW SLOW especially with crappy OS X microkernel.
Apple is a solutions provider. They’re selling servers for Macintosh environments which provide easy integration with Macintosh clients. Why would anyone with a Macintosh network want to run a Windows server? Certainly Linux/*BSD would suffice, but not without a great deal of painstaking configuration. An Xserve running OS X Server provides great support for Macintosh networks OOB.
“and what about SMP scalability it is also crap yet apple keeps pushing SMP macintosh because their processors are so SLOW.”
Do you have benchmarks or anything to back this up? No, of course not, you’re a stupid troll.
“the only way apple can’t be dead is to be like sun and swith to AMD based processor like Opteron. that will give them more power at much cheaper! people would actually buy macs then, nobody buys macs now except for stupid apple zealots who don’t know any better. why else would anybody buy shitty overpriced slow and obsolete hardware just to run crappy OSuX.”
In the wake of PPC970 and the rumored-to-be-upcoming Power5 derived PPC970 successor, there’s absolutely no reason for Apple to switch ISAs, not that switching ISAs is a feasable option for Apple. Hopefully in 2 years Apple will once again be the technological leader, sporting some snazzy IBM processors which are twice as fast as their x86 counterparts.
“apple could take a hint from Microsoft and start selling all their software for x86. the world’s biggest company is a SOFTWARE COMPANY, while all hardware companies like sun are about to go under. the real money is is software apple. sell your os x for regular pc hardware and maybe you’ll start raking in the bucks and your os won’t run like shit anymore because it will be on good hardware.”
I’ve been through the numbers before. Apple’s profit margins on OS X are razor thin, barely enough to subsidize the R&D necessary to develop it. If Apple were to release an x86 version, and it sold for substantially more to increase profit margins, who would purchase it as opposed to Windows? Windows is extremely mature with extensive driver support, whereas OS X wouldn’t be able to function on the majority of PCs.
Besides, how many people calling for a version of OS X that runs on commodity hardware would actually be willing to pay for it, as opposed to simply stealing it.
it’s all about x86 now, ppc is dead, apple is dead, and windows is undisputed king.
PPC is certainly not dead and seems set to surpass x86 around 2005.
r.i.p. apple, you couldn’t get with the times. when apple is dead all anyone can say is “They have only themselves to blame”
You know, generally companies aren’t considered as being on the verge of bankrupcy until they stop being profitable. While Apple’s profits are declining slowly, they are still making money, and consequently aren’t on the verge of death as so many anti-Apple zealots like to insist.
>>apple is trying to sell a server product when their OSkernel is crap ! it is based on 20 year old mach technology. everyone knows now that microkernel is slow slow slow. the only good microkernel is l4 and even it is only good on i386 ports to ppc are sux.
>>meanwhile microsoft is ready to release windows server 2003 which will be much more powerful and useful. nothing in macosx works, especially the stuff that’s designed to work with windows like smb. smb is the reason for most of OS X crashes !
>>why anyone buys apple computer I dunno they are SLOW SLOW SLOW especially with crappy OS X microkernel. and what about SMP scalability it is also crap yet apple keeps pushing SMP macintosh because their processors are so SLOW.
Alright – while my Mac is no longer my main machine and I hadn’t used OS X extensively since the Public Beta (my current main box is a dual athlon linux box) I do feel compelled to reply to this. XNU, the kernel for OS X, isn’t really a microkernel anymore – its a hybrid. Theres some monolithic designs to it – like what they did with the BSD and TCP/IP layers. While it circumvents some of the micro kernel advantages, it gives it huge performance improvements across the board. I’ve seen plenty of benchmarks showing that on the same hardware Linux is indeed faster, but rarely by huge margins. People who’d deply OS X Server aren’t Linux types anyways – their probably Mac admins for an art department or something. Besides, while Linux/Win/FreeBSD can be made to serve as a Mac file server Apple’s own platform probably does it better.
If OS X seems slow its not due to the kernel, its all Quartz – which doesn’t affect server performance anyways. Just log in remotely and never touch the local GUI.
>>why didn’t apple base their UNIX on linux instead? linux is very mature especially on ppc hardware and it’s FAST. much faster than os x on the same hardware. it really really really looks bad for apple when free OS is beating the one they spent so much money on. bad move apple.
>>with that said why would anyone pay for expensive apple hardware to run expensive apple server OS on when they can buy cheap PC hardware and run free Linux OS and have the SAME THING. in fact most of apple’s tools are just rebranded open source software, i.e. gnuchess => Chess.app, Samba, KHTML => Safari, cups, and all of Darwin which they just stole from BSD.
>>smooth move apple, I long for the day when bill gates is dancing on your grave. apple will be very dead soon.
Why isn’t OS X based on Linux? A couple of major reasons. One, historical – OS X is NeXTSTEP with a massive facelift and NeXTSTEP was based on BSD since the begining. Another, licensing may have something to do with it. Finally, at the time OS X development began Linux wasn’t nearly as mature as it is now.
I highly doubt we’ll see Apple die this decade – their niche, but their doing damn well considering. Better then SGI, thats for sure. Ever meet a Mac fan? Their rabid – very loyal folks. Growing base too, perhaps not exponentially, but growing nonetheless.
>>the only way apple can’t be dead is to be like sun and swith to AMD based processor like Opteron. that will give them more power at much cheaper! people would actually buy macs then, nobody buys macs now except for stupid apple zealots who don’t know any better. why else would anybody buy shitty overpriced slow and obsolete hardware just to run crappy OSuX.
>>seriously, apple people rip on microsoft and windows for being crashy, but OS X is much more crashy. windows xp is 100% stable and I have never ever had it crash, lock up, or go to the blue screen of death. OS X crashes just trying to browse windows file sharing over SMB. if u leave an OS X system just sitting there doing nothing, it crashes after a few days! what the hell, isn’t it supposed to be unix? where is the stability?
I’ve learned long ago that CPU performance doesn’t really matter much to Mac folks. My ex is a graphics designer and while my dual athlon box smokes her aging 266 mhz beige G3, shes extremely content with it and can whip out artwork faster then I – probably due to her being an artist and being extremely familar with her tools. Her G3 isn’t all that slow either, most Photoshop tasks I’ve seen her do happen quickly enough – she rarely has to wait on her computer, and she often works with very large files.
Apple most probably won’t switch architectures unless their backs are against a wall (its not yet there) for software compatibility reasons. Emulation sucks, could you imagine attempting to emulate AltiVec on a x86? Ick…Apple will do fine, even if they have to SMP everything to stay competitive. People buy Macs for the environment, not the CPUs.
>>apple will never do that though because steve jobs fancies himself an arteest and thinks x86 doesn’t fit into his “grand vision” of how the world should work. well guess what steve, the whole world moved on and left you in the dust. it’s all about x86 now, ppc is dead, apple is dead, and windows is undisputed king.
Stevo has nothing against x86 – Pixar is moving towards x86 boxen running Linux, but Apple is sticking with PPC for my above cited reasons – compatibility. PowerPC is *not* dead, perhaps it looks that way on the desktop front, but its widely used in the embedded market as well as IBM’s big boxen like its mainframes, super computers, and high end Unix boxes – the Power4 rocks. Totally kicks Itanic’s arse, thats for sure.
Later folks,
~Christopher
on XP stability – I’ve seen it crash plenty of times. Oh its considerably better then NT, but not imune to crashes either. On the other hand I hadn’t yet experienced first hand an OS X crash, perhaps due to my rare use of it. I’m sure it happens, nothings imune to bugs. Like most O.S.’s XP’s stability seems to hing on driver stability as well as the stability of the underlaying hardware. I’ve seen Linux (FreeBSD too) crash on some of my flacky hardware, but on most of my boxen it can just chug and chug forever seemingly without a hiccup. On a side note we have Exchange servers at work running on Win 2K that crash weekly. I hear from others that its not all that uncommon. We cluster our Exchange servers for performance and uptime concerns – MS’s solution I suppose, cluster the hell out of it to insure minimal downage.
NeXTSTEP is based on Mach, not BSD.
>on XP stability – I’ve seen it crash plenty of times.
I don’t think I have seen XP crashing. XP crashed only once to me when I used a bad CD-R device (didn’t know that the CD-R was half-dead). Usually, XP can crash when users are using Win9x drivers instead of native XP ones (using incompatible drivers can crash any OS though – I have completely crashed _many_ times with the Nvidia binary drivers). Other than that, XP is a very solid OS.
“After leaving Apple Computer in the 1980s, Steve Jobs founded a new computer company, with a new mind set: NeXT[1]. NeXT’s operating system, NeXTStep, was an object-oriented operating system based on Carnegie-Mellon’s Mach microkernel architecture, which was in turn based on the 4.2BSD release from the University of California. On top of Mach, NeXT implemented a Unix-like operating system called NeXTStep and replaced MIT’s X Windows System with a new graphical interface called Display Postscript. Display Postscript allowed for very fine control of the desktop and graphical environment, however it never caught on outside of NeXT systems.”
from http://www.daemonnews.org/200104/bsd_family.html
Mach is just a kernel, btw, NeXT has since the begining had BSD parts.
Oh I didn’t mean to claim that XP is inherently unstable, just that its not immune to crashing (though neither is Linux, however between the two my nod goes to Linux). My motherboard has a flacky chipset that BIOS and driver updates can’t seem to fix and after a few too many hours up XP will freeze. On the other hand my cousin also runs XP and he’s never seen it crash yet – though its probably his hardware.
seriously, apple people rip on microsoft and windows for being crashy, but OS X is much more crashy. windows xp is 100% stable and I have never ever had it crash, lock up, or go to the blue screen of death. OS X crashes just trying to browse windows file sharing over SMB. if u leave an OS X system just sitting there doing nothing, it crashes after a few days! what the hell, isn’t it supposed to be unix? where is the stability?
I dunno why you think that XP is 100% stable, is anything actually 100% guaranteed stable. Shut your mouth troll.
And I have left my box running since I updated to 10.2.4 about a week or so ago, and it hasn’t crashed yet. And before that, it had been running since 10.2.3.
What the hell is your problem, that’s the most retarded troll I’ve ever seen, shouldn’t trolls atleast have a IQ of 3?
Well, if you login to a NeXT machine, it will say NeXT Mach on login, and OPENSTEP for x86 is referred to as OPENSTEP/Mach. The UNIX under the surface has System V roots as well.
OS X crashes just trying to browse windows file sharing over SMB. if u leave an OS X system just sitting there doing nothing, it crashes after a few days! what the hell, isn’t it supposed to be unix? where is the stability?
I haven’t had any problems (besides performance) relating to SMB since 10.1. Jaguar seemed to fix the stability issues completely. It sounds like you’ve used 10.1 but haven’t tried Jaguar.
Jaguar, however, did introduce a problem regarding prebinding. Specifically, Jaguar enforces that all applications be prebound before execution. The program responsible, fix_prebinding, seems to be buggy, and if it crashes the mach_kernel will sit waiting for it to complete and not allow any new processes to be spawned.
Apple hasn’t published anything official regarding this problem (to my knowledge) nor have they addressed it in any of the 10.2 updates, even though it’s been known for quite some time. I’ve found a workaround, but it’s still incredibly annoying.
I don’t think I have seen XP crashing.
Eugenia, to be fair, you only run XP on one system with any regularity, as far as I know. I’ve seen XP lock up. I’ve seen XP bluescreen. I’ve seen XP services crash, and seen the popup timer counting down how long until the system automatically reboots.
XP is very stable, but it’s not without its problems.
Like most O.S.’s XP’s stability seems to hing on driver stability as well as the stability of the underlaying hardware.
I’ve had a horrible experience with the HSP56 Micromodem from PCtel. Microsoft wrote (and signed) drivers for this modem and included them in XP, and they simply do not work. Attempting to dial the modem results in hard locks. This problem has been echoed by several other users.
On the other hand, OS X is running on a closed platform developed entirely by Apple. There is absolutely no excuse for OS X crashes. Having maintained a network of Sparcs for several years, I’ve only seen Solaris kernel panic once, and that was in response to a hardware problem arising from a power outage. Apple needs to get their act together and address some of these issues…
If people would try to read some scientific research papers, they would know that on a PPC the switch between different memory pages/areas (a task or context switch) is not as time consuming as on an i386. So Apple can chose a microkernel without performance penalty. On i386 you have to implement a lot of tricks to get this thing going.
Is that prebinding bug the cause of the ‘beachball’ when launching certain applications?
The prebinding bug is responsible for the “beach ball of death” where the system becomes completely unusable, save for moving the spinning beach ball around the screen (i.e. even ssh stops responding)
Oh ok. Gotcha. Thanks. Been wondering what the hell caused that. I always assumed it was something to do with the Finder not having good threading, and it was choking.
The rare times I used XP (I think 1 day per week) I’m allways pleased to see it lagging when trying to access to a Firewire , USB, serial device even trying to access to CD can take a looonnnnnng time sometimes. In those cases I can tell you the very stable wonderfull XP is a dog SLOW (usually it ends with a manually raging reset). I used Linux too (x86,ppc) and I was fed up with try to configure driver devices or recompiling the kernel to support some standarts (digtal camera, digital camcorder..).
And one day I discover Os X which permits me to run many of the softwares I used under Linux with the ability to run somme nice proprietary applications (iMovie, iTunes…) and the ability to use many (many more than linux) devices by just plug them in.
The only drawback is the OS heavyness (too much Eye Candy?). Currently my config is: an Ibook 600 without the slow Finder but X11 with rox instead with the magic command open.
With MacOs X, I can run GNU softwares and proprietary ones. For me it’s the best alternative to Windows.
You’re right, logging onto any NeXT machine will say Openstep Mach – I know, I’ve had eight of them. However, Openstep/Mach refers to the Mach kernel which runs on Intel, NeXT, SPARC and HP architectures (there was a DEC Alpha port in the works but it was dropped when Apple bought NeXT). There was also Openstep/NT and Openstep/Solaris which, respectively, run on top of the NT and Solaris kernels.
However, Chris is right in stating that NeXTstep is based on BSD 4.2. Almost everything but the kernel and the GUI are based on BSD. Simply put: NeXTstep is Display Postcript sitting on top of BSD 4.2 which is running on a Mach kernel.
I can’t believe this. I bet anything this guy has never even used OS X Server. This latest update fixes quite a few problems. The XServe itself has been very well received, both in performance and price comparison. The big tip-off about this guy’s post is the Apple-should-be-a-software-company. They tried that and that was what almost made them actually go in the tank.
Although I’ve never experienced it, I know the pre-binding problem exists. I can’t recall – has it been pinned down yet, as to what the specific cause is?
The saying seems to go “Except for the bad drivers, XP is very stable”.
Isn’t the core of an OS responsible for: memory management, CPU scheduling, filesystem use, and driver loading/management?
If XP can’t handle drivers that it loads, wouldn’t that make it an unstable OS? If it can’t handle Windows 9x drivers, why is it loading them? Why can’t it fail gracefully when it sees drivers misbehaving?
I’m not trolling, but I’ve heard this excuse so many times from Microsoft, and it looks like people are just repeating it. Maybe someone can enlighten me as to why this isn’t just an excuse. . . Although I can understand that there are probably bad driver-writers out there, I can’t understand why they would be able to lock up the OS (outside of IRQ conflicts, etc.)
I think I have a fairly good grasp of what’s happening in regards to fix_prebinding.
fix_prebinding is spawned on demand by mach_kernel. Whenever a program is executed fix_prebinding checks if it’s already been prebound, and if not it’s prebound upon execution. It appears that fix_prebinding works in serial, and mach_kernel waits for fix_prebinding to finish prebinding one program before checking the prebinding of the next.
However, if fix_prebinding crashes (which it seems to a lot) and never messages mach_kernel that it’s finished prebinding an application, the kernel seems unable to spawn any new processes.
There’s a workaround to disable prebinding by setting an environment variable, and so far this has been very successful for me. I’ve only experienced one hard lock after setting this variable, compared to much more frequent crashes in the past.
I just want acknowledgement of the problem by Apple, and hopefully an official fix.
When I updated to 10.24 my workstation will display the date as 1969! Is there a fix, and is it happening on the server version?
I have a dual 867 tower.
Dan
This is my favorite quote from the troll:
“windows xp is 100% stable”
Honestly, it could be raining cats and rats outside and the weatherman still wouldn’t say “100% chance of rain today”.
One hundred percent? That is really funny … thanks troll …
Come on, seriously? Random problems will occur, but for the majority of people these problems do not occur. The fix? Set the damn date! You can do it manually, you can do it with a time server. It takes all of twelve seconds, man!
I have never had a prebinding hang up, but I have had a couple of non-related kernel panics. I have also crashed XP numerous times on a standard Dell box with no non-standard hardware or drivers… XP stability is not only a question when it comes to drivers.
I wasn’t speaking of you, I was talking about rowel’s post.
Bascule, yes, you made the problem very clear. I wonder why some have the problem so badly and others not at all?
Dan, go to http://www.macintouch.com or http://www.macfixit.com. They’ve been discussing the “1969” business the past few days.
“apple is trying to sell a server product when their OSkernel is crap ! it is based on 20 year old mach technology.”
how old is UNIX? enough said. hint: well over 20 years, more like 40.
“The fix? Set the damn date! You can do it manually, you can do it with a time server. It takes all of twelve seconds, man!”
I know that it only takes twelve seconds, but it is anoying. I have never had such a bad update before. EVEN on windows. It reminds me of when I had to set the time and date when I booted into DOS from a 5 1/4 in. floppy! “My name is Dan, and I am a switcher” :/
Thanks Jay for the advice. The French are using an iTime application, it helps lazy forgetful people like myself!
http://vincent.zorzi.free.fr/itime/
Dan W.
Exactly. But I think that the UNIX base has some SV heritage in it too, doesn’t it?