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OS X Businesses Operating Systems Apple

Apple Will Demo Mac OS X Server At WWDC 92

Posted by timothy from the apple-a-day dept.
epec254 writes "According to MacCentral the next new version of Mac OS X Server, based on Panther, will be previewed at the WWDC session 'Apple Solutions in Enterprise.' Maybe they will get file permissions right this time."
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Apple Will Demo Mac OS X Server At WWDC More

Apple Will Demo Mac OS X Server At WWDC

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  • Guess I have to ask (Score:4, Interesting)

    by andfarm ( 534655 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @08:05PM (#6218939)
    What was wrong with file permissions under previous versions?

    • Re:Guess I have to ask (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 16, 2003 @08:35PM (#6219158)
      They [Apple] didn't understand the concept of group permissions - files copied to a sharepoint had read only group permissions, even if the sharepoint's permissions were defined as group r/w.

      • umask? (Score:2, Informative)

        by netsrek ( 76063 )
        You're misrepresenting the situation.

        The default umask was the problem.

        You could override this, but doing this on all your clients may not have been practical.

        • Fraid not. umask only applies to the unix style apps that run under OS X. Anything in Classic, Carbon, or Cocoa totally ignores it.

      • It must be more complicated than this (Score:5, Insightful)

        by PDubNYC ( 650812 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2003 @01:43AM (#6220451)
        I may not be the smartest man, but to make a statement along the lines of "Apple didn't understand the concept of permissions" seems a tad simplified, arrogant, and wrong. I have to believe that they had a very good grasp of what they were doing, but perhaps ran into problems in the implementation. Not trying to be a dick, but I think you have to believe that the engineers working on OS X understand the concept of permissions, even if they ran into a problem with them. I am sure they are under tremendous pressure to get things out the door. That said, the problem you mentioned was a huge one, and I look forward to the continued improvement of OS X, client and server, even as I pray for a new hardware architecture based on the "G5" or whatever.

        • Re:It must be more complicated than this (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          This has got to be a failed troll. No-one in their right mind would respond so defensively about a simple engineering hiccough as if Apple were a dear sick relative.

          Remember, corporations are there to make money, if they fuck up it just means their managers won't be able to buy a fourth seafront property that quarter. Demand only the best from them, and for goodness sake don't ever stick up for them as if they cared one iota for you.

          • so... (Score:2, Interesting)

            by PDubNYC ( 650812 )
            what you are saying is that you know better than all of the engineers at Apple? Don't get me wrong, I think it sucks when something gets released that is not working properly. And if you want to write me off as some Mac-zealot, I couldn't care less. But the reality is that the people producing these products are individuals just like you and me, and I would like to think that they have some kind of pride in their work, not to mention the skills necessary to get the job in the first place, that would make

    • Re:Guess I have to ask (Score:4, Informative)

      by jtrascap ( 526135 ) <bitbucket@NospAm.mediaplaza.nl> on Monday June 16, 2003 @11:54PM (#6220051)
      Nothing a "umask 002" couldn't fix...

      Sheesh - you kids.
      • This simply doesn't work, while it may be fine for ftp transfers, copying files from jaguar finder to jaguar server doens't respect umask. The group bit was being set in puma (Mac OS X 10.1) although UNIX permissions were not being respected. A later version of Panther (10.2.3?) added the ability to have new files created over AFP either respect UNIX permissions or the permission of the group folder. Setable via the workgroup admin application on a share point by share point basis. I'm not exactly sure why
        • you have your 'code names' mixed up.

          10.0 -> Cheetah
          10.1 -> Puma
          10.2 -> Jaguar

          Panther is the next release, being demo'd this week at WWDC. Presumably this will be 10.3.
        • Very likely - I've not yet gotten our people here to invest in OS X Server, but it does work for the client-end systems and FTP, making developer tools like DreamWeaver MX work the way they're supposed to. You have NO idea how much annoyance this had produced for me...it's important for users to know about it.

          Still, this or RH, SuSE, Deb...I'll take OS X anyday.
    • Actually what was wrong is not so much a question of what was wrong, but a question of mixed up expectations. Mac users, when copying files/folders to a server expect the files/folders to inherit the permissions of the parent folder. Unix people expect toe files/folder to keep the permissions they had on the source volume. Unfortunately for Mac users the first version of the server software only iplemented the Unix way, not the Mac way. This was fixed recently and now the permission model is a per-server-vo
  • Seriously. I'm as big a Mac fan as the next guy, but the Mac is just not a server computer. Maybe if there're 970s at this WWDC that'll change a bit, but the current Moto PPC is just too underpowered, and its FSB is just too slow to be competitive. You can get more racks, but the dang things cost too much to be price-competitive.

    The best thing about the PPC is its vector unit, and that's not all that useful on a server (POWER architecture doesn't even have it; it had to be hacked on in the 970, and is w

    • Re:...from the oxymoron dept. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by psyconaut ( 228947 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @08:47PM (#6219235)
      "POWER architecture doesn't even have it; it had to be hacked on in the 970, and is worse in some ways than the MOTO Altivec)"

      I wouldn't exactly say it was "hacked on" and it's certainly not *worse* at comparible clock speeds to the Motorola implementation.

      Maybe you can point us to some references?

      Also, you don't think renderfarms benefit from Altivec? I know at least a few firms using small clusters of Xserves for rendering.

      Yes, the current crop of Motorola processors are definitely lackluster, but let's keep our eyes on the road kids ;-)

      -psy
      • OK. I cede the point on renderfarms; I was really talking about web/db servers. Still, there are probably better modifications to be made for rendering, ie huge video cards and shitloads of (fast!!) RAM.

        I can indeed point you to a reference on Altivec, namely this [arstechnica.com] page in the 970 ArsTechnia article. Quote from the article: It appears that in the 970 the Altivec unit is sort of "tacked on" to the core. While the vector register file sits alongside the general purpose and floating-point register files for
    • Well, no it isn't a server architecture presently, but who's to say it couldn't be in the future? I'd personally like to see this work out for them. In theory, the processor will be plenty powerful for it. Who cares if they hacked on Altivec? I doubt anyone will argue that the Power architecture isn't powerful enough to be used in server applications, and Apple can certainly make administration painless and easy enough if they want to. I say give 'em a chance!

    • Re:...from the oxymoron dept. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by chrispy666 ( 519278 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @09:05PM (#6219342)
      I tend to disagree.
      OSX server has its place on the market. Some people simply don't want to hire a whole IT dept. just to get a mail server or filesharing. In this case, since the server will be operated by non-unix-gurus, it has too look friendly to administer too. there you have it, OSX server.

      Plus, those blinking lights are simply coooooooool.

      • Re:...from the oxymoron dept. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2003 @09:20AM (#6222276)
        "the server will be operated by non-unix-gurus"

        Follow that to its conclusion: if it does the same job (with the same reliability, security, features, etc.), and does not need to be operated by unix gurus, does it even matter if it is Unix? No. Unix is great mostly because of the years and years of solid implementation (much of which is due to "openness", e.g. open source), I don't think it has much to do with design (as you can witness by modern features having to be bolted on).

    • Re:...from the oxymoron dept. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Llywelyn ( 531070 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2003 @12:12AM (#6220116) Homepage
      A couple of years ago I was hired to put together an LDAP server for a major university. It had to hold student records, give them the option to change them, and do a few other nice things along these lines.

      We used RedHat Linux in a Penguin Computing Rackmount, it is ashame one of these things was not available then.

      It didn't need to have a 1337 processor(s), it needed to never crash and have protection and backups in case it did. It didn't need a fast hard drive, it did need to be easy to configure and nearly brainless to maintain or use.

      This would have been perfect for that task.

    • Re:...from the oxymoron dept. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by fdobbie ( 226067 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2003 @01:54AM (#6220485) Homepage
      Actually, I heard that one WebObjects developer's Sun servers were up for renewal, so they replaced 3 mid-spec SPARCs with one xserve and got a massive performance INCREASE.

    • Re:...from the oxymoron dept. (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday June 17, 2003 @07:04AM (#6221292) Journal
      he current Moto PPC is just too underpowered

      Maybe. I suspect that this is true for large sites (well, except iTMS, which I hear works just fine on a bunch of X-Servers). For most small buisnesses, however, modern CPUs are overpowered. Our current server is a 750HMz Duron with 256MB of RAM. It handles email (SMPT, POP3, IMAP and webmail), about a hundred individual web sites (not very high traffic, about 15000 requests per day average), Jabber (public server, listed on the jabber.org site), a web-cam and a few other things. Its load average sits at under 0.20. In fact I'm running top on it right now, and the most CPU-intensive thing it's doing is running top. We stopped upgrading it a while back and diverted the funds to new workstations.

      you can run it on an AMD or whatever for half the price.

      For a small buisness the additional cost of an X-Server over an Intel/AMD Linux/*BSD server is minute compared to the amount that they can save by not employing someone fulltime to maintain it.

      The OS is not designed to be a server, it's designed to be a personal use OS.

      A lot of the kernel is from FreeBSD which is very much a server OS. The rest is designed to increase usability. Linux (and *BSD for that matter) are not friendly for people with no *NIX experience (well, they might be on a desktop where you can hide behind gnome or KDE, but not on a server). An X-Serve could quite easily be run in-house by a company which already has Mac-experienced employees, and a company that is not a 'computer company' is much more likely to have Mac people in house than *NIX people.

      Of course I wouldn't recommend using an X-Serve for hosting a site like /., but for a SME that out-sources all of its IT support it would be a cost-effective solution.

      • Our current server is a 750HMz Duron with 256MB of RAM. It handles email (SMPT, POP3, IMAP and webmail), about a hundred individual web sites (not very high traffic, about 15000 requests per day average), Jabber (public server, listed on the jabber.org site), a web-cam and a few other things. Its load average sits at under 0.20. In fact I'm running top on it right now, and the most CPU-intensive thing it's doing is running top.

        Post a link to your server here and we will see how well it runs. Go on... I
      • Our current server is a 750HMz Duron with 256MB of RAM. It handles email (SMPT, POP3, IMAP and webmail), about a hundred individual web sites (not very high traffic, about 15000 requests per day average), Jabber (public server, listed on the jabber.org site), a web-cam and a few other things. Its load average sits at under 0.20. In fact I'm running top on it right now, and the most CPU-intensive thing it's doing is running top. We stopped upgrading it a while back and diverted the funds to new workstations.

  • Aqua Lite? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cloudless.net ( 629916 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @09:12PM (#6219379) Homepage
    Will Apple make a faster, simplified version of Aqua for the server? The current Mac OSX GUI seems very resource hungry. In Windows Server 2003, themes and many visual effects are disabled by default. Will Apple do the same for Mac OSX server?

    • Re:Aqua Lite? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Hungus ( 585181 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @09:17PM (#6219406) Journal
      Just run it headless on my Xserves at Idle I use less than 1% total CPU and thats while monitoring it. the gui only comes up when i log into it as a user ( via ARD or TB2)

      • Re:Aqua Lite? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by SandSpider ( 60727 )
        You don't even need to run it headless, just don't do anything in the GUI. I have a dual-processor XServe that runs with no blue lights unless someone's accessing something, and a couple blue lights on one processor if they are. That's logged in, with the monitor on, and top running continuously in a terminal window. I'll be adding various services to it that'll increase the processor load, and yeah, running, for example, a matrix-style screen saver will eat up a decent amount of the processing power, but w

      • Just don't use GUI (Score:4, Interesting)

        by benwaggoner ( 513209 ) <ben@waggoner.microsoft@com> on Monday June 16, 2003 @10:27PM (#6219704) Homepage
        I run a 10.2.7 Server for my email, FTP, etcetera. It's an old Blue and White G3 400, and it's plenty fast for me for everything I've done. And the GUI doesn't eat up cycles when the machine isn't being used hands on. I can ssh in and run top, and the Windows Server is only around 1%, even though it's plugged into a monitor, with a pre Quartz Extreme video card.

        I really like the Mac server. Easy to administrate, with all the UNIX goodness lying just under the surface. And while I'm a generally technical guy, I'm certaily not an admin by nature.

    • Re:Aqua Lite? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Pathwalker ( 103 ) * <hotgrits@yourpants.net> on Monday June 16, 2003 @10:05PM (#6219621) Homepage Journal
      If you were using an OSX box as a server, you would probably disable the GUI and run the system with a text console.

      You do that by editing /etc/ttys and uncommenting the first of these two lines, while commenting out the second:
      #console "/usr/libexec/getty std.9600" vt100 on secure

      console "/System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Cont ents/MacOS/loginwindow" vt100 on secure window=/System/Library/CoreServices/WindowServer onoption="/usr/libexec/getty std.9600"
      (random spacing in the second long line inserted by slashdot's anti-page-widening code)

    • Will Apple make a faster, simplified version of Aqua for the workstation? The current Mac OSX GUI seems very resource hungry.
  • I admit I haven't played around with OS X Server at all. Does it have a package of functions compareable to a windows domain? Like centralized user resources/authentification, GPO's, etc.? Or am I thinking outside of the scope of what it was intented to do? If I am, what is it inteneded to do then, just be a simple file/printer share server, web hosting?

    Just curious.

    • Re:Windows Domain-like functions? (Score:4, Informative)

      by m0rph3us0 ( 549631 ) on Monday June 16, 2003 @09:26PM (#6219453)
      OS X supports LDAP, and i believe it also supports kerebos, these two technologies are the basis for AD in Windows 2000. It also supports NetInfo which is similar in function to LDAP

      • Re:Windows Domain-like functions? (Score:5, Informative)

        by kwerle ( 39371 ) <kurt@CircleW.org> on Monday June 16, 2003 @10:46PM (#6219770) Homepage Journal
        It also supports NetInfo which is similar in function to LDAP.

        How sad that it is reduced to this. NetInfo is one of the finest resource administrative systems available. It is very unfortunate that it is languishing - mostly unused and un-talked about. (yes, every system uses it by default, but I'd say that most folks on a network don't use/understand it to a fraction of it's potential)

        Yes, I'm one of those NeXT zealots :-/
      • You've got it round the wrong way. User authentication info is still stored in a NetInfo database, it just available either via NetInfo domains, or via LDAP. geddit?
        • Yes there is the netinfo to ldap gateway but you can also bind to an ldap server as well. Look in Directory Access (plus they have an Active Directory mapping as well).
          • but local user accounts are still stored in a netinfo db.

            there's no reason why this can't change, the whole DirectoryServices thing is rather modular, but that was the thrust of my comment.

            If you're not storing accounts yourself, then sure you can bind to LDAP.

            If you are storing accounts, even if you're publishing them via LDAP, you're still storing them in NetInfo databases.

  • Oh, please fix AMS... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by EvilStein ( 414640 ) <spamNO@SPAMpbp.net> on Tuesday June 17, 2003 @10:16AM (#6222819)
    AppleMailServer still sucks. I hope they stick a GUI on Postfix/courier or something. ;)

    Our OS X Server here got Postfix & Courier-IMAP installed right out of the box. Much easier to add SpamAssassin/procmail/etc and I don't have to deal with the AppleMail Server big-phat-file way of doing things.

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