Macos Server: What's so special about it?

[Cineplex]

I can't see anything on that list that wouldn't run on the most basic of VMs, even in AWS or Azure.

I can't believe they list a torrent client on there.

Now if you were going to run a hotline server....okay! lol Somehow that didn't make the list.

 

[bingeciren]

Hey, torrenting and running hotline servers are "serious" uses.

 

[belvdr]

Thank goodness for double quotes.

 

[Cineplex]

Hey, torrenting and running hotline servers are "serious" uses.

He's got me there.

 

[campyguy]

Well these folks are using it seriously until the power supply fails (only 1), the hard drive dies (most have only 1), & the NIC card fails (only 1).

So let's see....no redundant power, no redundant data (for most), and no redundant network. There is no service parts kit on hand, no CD-ROM to access for quick rebuild or diagnostics, no serial port to access hardware controllers remotely or install the OS without a display, and no second network connection to verify the server is still there if it goes down. That is not a real server. The Xserve, yes...this thing....no. Cheap, or crazy Mac people, and non-mission critical people use them. For a small site you don't care about it's fine. If your income relies on that one mini on the shelf....you would be an idiot. And this is coming from someone that had several that I managed in a datacenter along with real servers. They were so painful to deal with. Despite the advertising, Mac OS X Server doesn't "just work".

No offense, I was alluding only to the Server app and didn't get into the actual setup we're using. I own 1 personally, and 7 in my small company - they're all integrated into a Sonnet xMac Mini Server, with slightly different configurations. The xMac has a power supply, so there's the redundant PS bit addressed. The Server configuration has, by default, two drives installed - I've swapped out one of the spinners on my personal unit with a Samsung 850 Pro SSD and all of my work units have had both spinners swapped out for 2TB 850 Pro SSDs in RAID 0 (they're used as video ingest machines and front ends for file servers, and backed up every day). And a 10G PCIe NIC card is installed in one of the two PCIe slots. The Minis are also maxed with 16GB of RAM.

Like my hopped-up Benz (650HP - at the wheel, not the flywheel...), my Mini Servers aren't "stock"! They get the job done, only faster. :evil grin:

FWIW, I also have several Win 2012 Server boxes in my shops and we're also using Office 365 and backing up to Amazon AWS. One hour of downtime costs me a lot of money, however, I can offer that not one of my Macs has caused an issue or had any downtime. I'm planning on dialing one of the newer Minis into an xMac early next year - Sonnet's got quite the beast there in the xMac, and it's upgradable to TB3 too. Cheers, and Happy Holidays!

 

[kiwipeso1]

What was the bandwidth of the internet video broadcast in 1993? Even if you had a fast upload speed, I'd doubt that the audience was that lucky or that many. I remember struggling with dial-up modems in those days.

We used a Quadra 840AV, which had a Geoport modem running at 33.6k constantly for the 24 hour broadcast from Wellington Town Hall via Wellington City Council to Antartica which was on a direct satellite connection to the internet backbone.
We had arranged this with the Antartica base network technician, who mentioned he had a T1 connection to his room, and so he came for some vacation time in Wellington.
As far as the audience was, I recall it was in the order of thousands, mainly due to the Many Hands band being barely known outside of New Zealand. Still, we beat the Rolling Stones online by two weeks.
[doublepost=1481934038][/doublepost]

LOL! You have convinced me with your enlightened insults and insecurities. You are right, I am like the PhD.....he was a highly educated individual trying to understand the rubbish you were spewing. Thank you for the compliment. It was very helpful that you provided your resume of running a BNC cable for the real professionals in 1993. Good job! Give yourself a hug.

It takes practical knowledge to discover 7 new fields of maths, not merely a short thesis on formal topics of little impact such as required by professors who only started tertiary level maths in university.
In the topic of cryptography, he has 20 years less experience, and it shows.
In the case of his lecturer, he started that topic of maths only in his mid 20s, and it shows why he doesn't understand how my research interacts, but that does not prevent an ignorant comment from a professor who has never studied my new fields of research (or for that matter capable of understanding how it works), or a layman such as my uncle the senior medical consultant who has no capacity to understand even the basics of mere post-grad maths.

I welcome your comments when they do not start from a premise of ignorance.
[doublepost=1481934388][/doublepost]

Well these folks are using it seriously until the power supply fails (only 1), the hard drive dies (most have only 1), & the NIC card fails (only 1).

So let's see....no redundant power, no redundant data (for most), and no redundant network. There is no service parts kit on hand, no CD-ROM to access for quick rebuild or diagnostics, no serial port to access hardware controllers remotely or install the OS without a display, and no second network connection to verify the server is still there if it goes down. That is not a real server. The Xserve, yes...this thing....no. Cheap, or crazy Mac people, and non-mission critical people use them. For a small site you don't care about it's fine. If your income relies on that one mini on the shelf....you would be an idiot. And this is coming from someone that had several that I managed in a datacenter along with real servers. They were so painful to deal with. Despite the advertising, Mac OS X Server doesn't "just work".

Plenty of spare parts are available for power supplies, etc.
Most server grade minis have dual SSDs, and thunderbolt is there for spare ethernet ports.

CD-ROMs ? What is this, the 90s ?
Thunderbolt gigabit ethernet is a simple and cheap plugin for a second network connection.
"not a real server." LOL, you are not an informed commentator, just a negative old clown.

 

[Cineplex]

We used a Quadra 840AV, which had a Geoport modem running at 33.6k constantly for the 24 hour broadcast from Wellington Town Hall via Wellington City Council to Antartica which was on a direct satellite connection to the internet backbone.
We had arranged this with the Antartica base network technician, who mentioned he had a T1 connection to his room, and so he came for some vacation time in Wellington.
As far as the audience was, I recall it was in the order of thousands, mainly due to the Many Hands band being barely known outside of New Zealand. Still, we beat the Rolling Stones online by two weeks.
[doublepost=1481934038][/doublepost]

It takes practical knowledge to discover 7 new fields of maths, not merely a short thesis on formal topics of little impact such as required by professors who only started tertiary level maths in university.
In the topic of cryptography, he has 20 years less experience, and it shows.
In the case of his lecturer, he started that topic of maths only in his mid 20s, and it shows why he doesn't understand how my research interacts, but that does not prevent an ignorant comment from a professor who has never studied my new fields of research (or for that matter capable of understanding how it works), or a layman such as my uncle the senior medical consultant who has no capacity to understand even the basics of mere post-grad maths.

I welcome your comments when they do not start from a premise of ignorance.
[doublepost=1481934388][/doublepost]

Plenty of spare parts are available for power supplies, etc.
Most server grade minis have dual SSDs, and thunderbolt is there for spare ethernet ports.

CD-ROMs ? What is this, the 90s ?
Thunderbolt gigabit ethernet is a simple and cheap plugin for a second network connection.
"not a real server." LOL, you are not an informed commentator, just a negative old clown.

This whole reply just shows how clueless you are about....well everything. Enjoy convincing everyone how smart you are.

 

[kiwipeso1]

This whole reply just shows how clueless you are about....well everything. Enjoy convincing everyone how smart you are.

I've done research that my old university couldn't do with a global top 500 supercomputer over 8 years in a matter of ten minutes on pen and paper.
I think it is a fair assessment that I am more capable and more intelligent than the average scientist, and I am more than capable of creating my own server software system on my own when I choose to do so.

 

[Cineplex]

I've done research that my old university couldn't do with a global top 500 supercomputer over 8 years in a matter of ten minutes on pen and paper.
I think it is a fair assessment that I am more capable and more intelligent than the average scientist, and I am more than capable of creating my own server software system on my own when I choose to do so.

LOL! And yet...you spend your time fighting with us inferiors on MacRumors. So now you're going to write your own server OS?

 

[belvdr]

I've done research that my old university couldn't do with a global top 500 supercomputer over 8 years in a matter of ten minutes on pen and paper.

Someone doesn't know how to run the computer system if a human can defeat it in 10 minutes.

I think it is a fair assessment that I am more capable and more intelligent than the average scientist, and I am more than capable of creating my own server software system on my own when I choose to do so.

If you're able to write your own server OS and make it usable, then you'd be the first person to do so single-handedly that I know of.

 

[BrighterShades]

The second clue is they don't have anything about it on apple.com...not a peep.

http://www.apple.com/macos/server/

 

[belvdr]

http://www.apple.com/macos/server/

I think you have to search for that, though. I wasn't able to find it by browsing.

 

[Xgm541]

Not sure if it's been mentioned in this thread...

I use OSX server for file sharing exclusively. I updated to one of the later versions of OSX (10.11) and it required a server app upgrade. Little did I know that the newest version of the server app broke file sharing on some devices. Can you download a DMG and downgrade your server app to what worked before? Nope, because OSX won't let you install an older version.

After looking for a work around online, and without finding a working one, I had to not only reinstall OSX 10.10, but I also lost my OSX server config file.

 

[Daniel Santos]

I run OS X server since leopard. That version cost me nearly 500€ (Ouch!). I use it for web serving wiki, mail server, file sharing. All those tasks can be done without having the server app, but the UI is helpful for doing simple tasks.

For example, I now want to add a virtual host to apache that can do load-balancing to three other machines, and I don't have a clue of how to do that with the management GUI. Probably it can't be done. I'll have to configure it manually in the server's config files, that will probably get trashed the next time I configure something in the GUI.

 

[guzhogi]

I believe, technically, the Server app is just a gui frontend for the actual services, which can be controlled by command line. I'm not geeky enough to do that. I've used Server & the various Apple server tools before it for a while. I've noticed that they've gotten more small/home business capable, and not as well-suited to larger companies as it used to be. Just saying.

 

[magicMac]

macOS server is designed to compete with workgroup servers like Windows Server and groupware services like mail/calendar/directory and file sharing. A bunch of MacMini's running Server.app is perfectly suited to small companies and even some medium companies. It doesn't need to be a separate OS because MacOS is already a stable server-grade UNIX OS and most the services can be enabled and controlled on the command line without Server.app.

Honestly, for a lot of companies the administrative overhead, expensive hardware and high licensing costs of microsoft software is really not worth it, especially if you have less than 50 staff and most the computers in the company are Mac's.

It's hard for some geeks to believe but there are millions of "non IT" companies out there who still need to use computers. Companies, charities and organisations which do design work, graphics work, editing, publication, movie production, professional photography, sound production, theatre, music studios, education etc... this is the market apple appeal to.

 

[BeautifulWoman_1984]

Wow, I definitely appreciate the informative replies!

I'll write a lengthy reply soon.