“Apple thoroughly overhauled a large portion of its server operating system in this release. This is the most significant change to the Mac OS since Apple moved from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X” says the AFP548 web site on their review of Mac OS X Server Panther.
Panther Server: Bring on the Big Cat!
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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> This is the most significant change to the Mac OS since Apple moved from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X
I also would find this significant since OS 9 never had a server OS
uhh… I think it was made as a comparison to give you something with which to measure how much they believe has changed in this version. 9 to X: big step. This update…
Depends on your definition of server – they had extensions to OS9 that made it a server (my memory is rusty here, but Macintosh Manager, Workgroup Manager, etc)
They had centralized user/group management, file/print sharing, control over user environments, etc.
Sure they did…AppleShare IP
that was the server under classic versions of the macos
Yes OS 9 has a version of Mac-Manager that runs on it. We actually run 3 OS 9 servers at my workplace.
I’ve been impressed with OS X Server ever since I first saw it in action. It’s a UNIX system with easy ways to set up your services. I’m just left wondering why Linux and the free BSD’s can’t come up with similar things. I know many die hard UNIX admins spit on the idea of using a GUI to configure servers, but in many places with plain vanilla servers GUI’s can be very useful. I took a shot at building a front end to Apache 1.3 myself, but I suck at coding so I pretty much dropped it.
With every new major release from the big distro makers I hope to find GUI server configuration/management tools. RedHat was getting started but I’m not so sure now with Fedora. I’m not saying I must have a GUI for every single daemon on the system, but in my view it’d only make sense to have a GUI on the most popular ones. DNS, DHCP, FTP, HTTP, SMB, NFS, AFP, SSH and LDAP should be doable. Too bad I don’t know enough about coding in C to build these myself, but how hard can it really be to someone who knows how?
Webmin is doing many of the things I’d like to see already, but it feels clunky because it uses a web browser to present its GUI. The functionality of webmin modules poured into GNOME and KDE interfaces would add tremendous value to Linux/BSD for the parttime admin at small businesses.
quote:
I’m not saying I must have a GUI for every single daemon on the system, but in my view it’d only make sense to have a GUI on the most popular ones. DNS, DHCP, FTP, HTTP, SMB, NFS, AFP, SSH and LDAP should be doable. Too bad I don’t know enough about coding in C to build these myself, but how hard can it really be to someone who knows how?
What does coding in C have to with setting up DNS/DHCP/FTP/HTTP/SMB/NFS/AFP/SSH/LDAP servers? Unrelated if you ask me. If you mean working with config files, it’s just as easy as editing a text file, provided you have some understanding of what the properties mean. If you were to look at a GUI setup tool, you’d still need to understand what the options mean.
For a workgroup server, yeah Windows might make sense (ActiveDirectory and what not). But look at this scenario: suppose you’re a web hosting company. The more boxes you have the more customers you can handle and more == more $$$. The larger hosting companies have racks upon racks of 1U/2U servers, some even go as far as using blade servers as economy web servers. Considering the density of these racks, multiply that by the number of Win2K3 licenses you have to buy.
Or just get barebones hardware and put a *nix flavor on it. The savings is night and day. Why spend that money for an OS license on an “economy” sized web server that brings in less than $10 a month (the monthly cost of the web hosting because it’s the value plan).
Wasn’t he talking about coding a GUI in C?
Wasn’t he talking about coding a GUI in C?
*blink blink*
Good point. Let’s all review that Qt Designer tutorial again together, that’ll be a step in the right direction.
Writing a tool that will allow to do all Apache configuration via GUI would take more time then writing the Apache itself. Configuration files of complex applications are often just shy of “real” programming languages in complexity, and putting all this in GUI would be insanely hard even for Apple.
In my opinion, the best possible way of editing config files would be using something like Eclipse. You get both error-proof editing and freedom to do whatever you want in one unified package.
Apple cant seem to fix the man pages. They send you to FreeBSD site for man page look ups. The man pages in 10.2 are wrong, have they fixed this in 10.3? Because sending people to the FreeBSD website is not right.
How about fixing some of the man pages Apple. Do a service pack or have you forgotten about 10.2?
I’m not a developer but I do work closely with these people, so I’m only stating my opinion on this matter.
Many developers have the mindset that if you add more things to the system, that’ll be one more obligation to look after. Before you say that I’m accusing devs of being lazy, that is absolutely not what I’m saying… It’s more of an “adoption” issue…
When we talk about frontends for server administration, we’re talking about root (or administrator) access to a GUI frontend. And then there’ll be issues like buffer overflow and other security issues. It’s bound to happen, and when it does, people expect the devs to address this issue, regardless if the project is open source or whatever.
Which is why many of them have a mindset of keeping it simple… and if it’s not broken, why fix it?
why kill yourself by coding it in C?
just code it is perl (you are just configuring a plain text file) and then you can use Bash to do the stop starts and other resets you need to get the changed noticed. you can code the front end in your language of choice and viola!! your done.
the hard part is getting the bindings to Jive 🙂
have you set up your settings in OS X?
you don’t have to know SQUAT!!! you click the button of the service you want and boom!! its configured and done. but of course you have more options and abilities from the server version, but it is still that simple, but OS X does A LOT in the background by collecting all your network settings and such including network probing making the information you need minimal.
The last version of Panther server I used was an early beta. I am almost sure this tool was not removed from the actual release but I will see once I go back home and pickup all my developer mail.
Anyway, the feature is a server admin tool. It allows for administration of all the services that Mac OS 10.3 offers out of the box. You can configure/start/stop/look at logs/other options I don’t remeber on all of the server via a GUI. It was designed to work from any computer, well just macs, and you can assess modify and configure you server remotely. So there is a client and server component to the software.
In the beta I had it sort of worked. There were some things that did not work at all and none of the info for each option was written yet. But if its at full working condition upon final release it would be a very handy util.
Python http://www.python.org/
PyGTK http://www.daa.com.au/~james/software/pygtk/
Learn it. Use it. Love it. Your brain will thank you.
debman, can you try “boom” postfix/cyrus with virtual domains spamassassin, sieve/vacation and cyrus load balancing, maybe ssl/tls? I would like to see how you gonna do it.
cdr