Here's the thing: My company is running AppleShare IP 5.0.3. We were thinking about upgrading to IP 6.x, but it's $1K for a 50 user license!!! Someone in our camp said, "Let's chuck the whole thing and run NT instead."

I said, "Hey, what about OS X Server? It's only $500 and we already have the G3 hardware just sitting there..."

The move to OS X will be dependent on two things:
1) Our Print Spooling is taken care of by AppleShare IP. Can OS X do it, too?

2) Our G3 Server (with 8.1) also handles the Retrospect backup. Is there a Retrospect or similar backup server for OS X yet? -- This is probably the most important limiting factor.

Any ideas or direction you may have would be very appreciated.

Hi Wally,

print spooling should be no problem at all. Backup scheduling would probably be done by another application. The nice thing about OS X Server is, that even if there is no software available for the on or the other task, you can still write a little script that packs all the data into a ".tar.gz"-file and puts it someplace safe. The script gets executed by the cron-daemon at specified dates.

And believe me, FileSharing is amazingly fast! Administration is very easy and you can import the prefs from AppleShareIP.

regards, Stephan

I wish I had thought of that. Once I get into the Mac mindset, I forget that OS X Server is a UNIX type OS. Now to see if my tape drive has drivers that'll work. I'll have to dig up some books about print spooling on UNIX, I suppose, to figure that other one out.

Thanks,
Wally