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Luca B · Sep 16, 2001, 11:37 AM

I have to set up a server for almost 10 client Mac working as a fileserver and sharing ADSL internet connection. Is Os X server a good solution or Linux is more reliable?
Thanks for any answer.

utidjian · Sep 21, 2001, 11:40 AM

Originally posted by Luca B:
<STRONG>I have to set up a server for almost 10 client Mac working as a fileserver and sharing ADSL internet connection. Is Os X server a good solution or Linux is more reliable?</STRONG>

I have been using Linux for several years for the purposes you list (and more). MOSXS is great if you have an all Mac environment and have limited experience with server setup. You should read the manual for MOSXS which is available online from Apple. Figure out the exact setup you want and see if you can figure it out.
If you are new to setting up a server and/or you are not familiar with Linux then Linux will be more difficult (all other things considered equal).

I have found MOSXS to be fairly reliable out of the box... if you run stuff like Mac Manager then reliability starts to suffer. Linux is also reliable out of the box... there are probably quite a few updates and patches that have to be applied but that is very easy to do. Linux also tends to stay reliable... that is to say... once setup it will be a very boring server (I like that).

In summary I would choose Linux over MOSXS. I am familiar with both of them but prefer Linux. If I were you I would choose whichever system you are most comfortable with and that meets all of your needs.

entropic · Sep 24, 2001, 11:13 PM

I have had a very good experience with Mac OS X Server. i am running it on a hacked 9500/200 and I am getting up to 4 MB/sec sustained throughput download and more like 3 MB/s upload to the server. I am using ATA drives via a Sonnet card. It has been very stable even on this hacked/unsupported hardware. I have not had it crash since I put it to use. It took about 5 minutes to setup (most of from running the initial setup program). I can log into it from Windows and Linux clients (using SMB or NFS). It is able to share my AppleTalk only printer with my Windows 98 and linux boxen. I have meesed with netatalk and got it working on a Linux box and it is possible to do almost all of these things on a Linux box. However there is no comparison is ease of setup and admin. Use a Linux box if you have more Linux knowledge than money, and use the mac OS X Server if you have more money than Linux knowledge.

-entro

speirsfr · Sep 25, 2001, 04:37 AM

I run a school lab of 6 iMacs on a G3/450 server with 256Mb RAM. I've found Apple File Services to be one of the least reliable parts of the server.

I am actively researching moving the entire lab over to Linux, both clients and server. OSXS is good if you have OS9 clients, but the file sharing will occasionally crash and therefore crash all the clients.

I see this once every couple of days.

Fraz