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lapinos · Jul 9, 2001, 08:56 AM

We are a 15 people design agency, 90% Mac users.
Our NT server is getting old, we must think about a new server. So, what are the arguments to move away from a standard M$ OS and set up a MacOS X server?
Since it is a decision for the next 3 years, we must choose carefully...
So, why MOSX server?

Thanks for the input and true stories.

Greg

Charles Astwood · Jul 9, 2001, 10:04 AM

If you had asked me this question 12 months ago I would have said OSX Server all the way. However the last 12 months have changed my mind completly. I would now have to say that the best thing for you to do is get a Windows 2000 server. And why I say this is the following:
When I had my OSX Server 1.2 everything for ages was fine, then I got hit by the DesktopDB bug, if you haven't heard of it it basically dropped all Appleshare Clients due to a corrupted desktop file. I suddenly started getting this every few weeks or so requiring a restart and rebuild of the desktop files Tech Note). Not good from a fileserver where you expect 99.999% uptime. Apple however didn't release a bugfix, their bugfix was in fact a �800 'upgrade' to OS X Server v10.

I already run W2K servers and had already moved one departments files to this platform. I had the choice do I backup, reformat my RAID system and run a W2K platform or do I get the new OSX server software and hopefully plug and play. I went for the OSX upgrade.

Recieved it on Thursday, Thursday nite all the users had gone home. Took the server down and reinstalled the new software. Installation was quite easy, apart from having to wipe 2 partitions into one as my old server ran off a 1Gig partition and the new server wanted 1.5 Gig to install.

What happened next should have been a warning. Setting permissions on the folders took about a hour each folder to make all the nested folders inhert permisisons. I was here for an age.

So had done all that, it could have been worse, the RAID was visable after the upgrade. So the users started working, half an hour later I started getting calls, we have dropped off the server, we are stalling for 5 minutes before we can carry on working. Looking at the server logs it is dropping connections with a tickle_timeout_disconnect.

Increased the tickle_timout value with limited success Tech Note), the drops were less frequent but still there. Phoned Apple, their tech support was severly lacking, they kept thinking my internet connection was dropping, it took me ages to tell them it was a internal network thing.

So as I write this, the new server has an extremly bad bug, no sign of a patch and a lot of frustrated users. Looking through Apples Discussion forums this is not an isolated incident. Many people are suffering from it.

However my Windows 2000 servers are a dream. They have excellent Mac support builtin as well as very good network transfer speeds. If you have more that one server then you only need to run one set of usernames and passwords. If there is a problem you will find a patch is quickly released. The uptime on them is excellent. On my main fileserver it has never crashed and has only required two restarts for 2 patches out of work hours in 8 months.

I can't recommend the W2K server more highly. I think I will transfer the OS X Server to W2K over the weekend, I just can't afford to go through these sorts of problems.

theboss · Jul 9, 2001, 08:42 PM

Ah, it's been a slow day.

A new member with only one post whose invective against Mac OS X couldn't be more clear? His pro-microsoft rant was a bit too obvious, it appears we have detected a troll.

My department (the 'Computer Resources Group') has had many problems with our windows 2000 servers, including a new IBM that arrived yesterday and gave us its blue-screen salute in the first few minutes of configuration. Too bad my coworkers who advocated linux on that machine did not win the debate. Last summer, one of this server's siblings (from dell) shipped with an incorrect driver for some trivial component and wouldn't boot for over a week of trouble-shooting. Now that is a waste of our money and our time.

You should try Mac OS X as your serving platform. It has wonderful support for your Macs and it supports windows and linux clients very well. This fact alone should sway forward-thinking IT shops. With an open-source core, you are assured that patches will be very quick when problems arise (Darwin has over 70,000 registered developers). Apache is preinstalled, so you can run the best webserver if you want to. So much free software is being ported that you won't have to pay the exorbitant prices for proprietary products ever again if you so choose. The configuration of the server and client management are both very streamlined and intuitive. You can SSH into your machine for remote administration. Your current Mac users will be able to do some troubleshooting on your server, where they'd be lost trying to do the same on an NT machine.

Since you're already 90% Mac, you should take the logical step and serve on a Mac. You'll reduce the expense of maintaining an orphaned server, and you'll save money with simplified upkeep and the chance that troubleshooting skills will transfer easily from workstations to server.

I am planning on moving a company for whom I consult from NT to OS X in the fall/winter timeframe, though the majority of their workstations remain windows (though perhaps not for too long).

It's tough to find advisors with no bias, but hopefully you can. Weigh your past experiences with info you collect about OSX servers. Also, check Apple's webpages for success stories of people in similar situations.

lapinos · Jul 10, 2001, 04:27 AM

The score is now 1-1, thanks a LOT for taking the time to share your experience.
Charles Astwood mentiones a real problem he had with OSX, that is to take into account. On the other hand, "theboss" had his load of problems with W2k too.

I am eager to read more true stories about OSX server usage versus W2k in a small biz context like mine!

greg

Charles Astwood · Jul 10, 2001, 05:08 AM

Originally posted by theboss:
Ah, it's been a slow day.

A new member with only one post whose invective against Mac OS X couldn't be more clear? His pro-microsoft rant was a bit too obvious, it appears we have detected a troll.

Ah, a troll. That would be me, I only came accross this board yesterday looking for some solutions to my tickle_timeout problem which would explain the first post. I am a frequent contributer to macfixit.com, I help out a number of mac only networks, I give up my spare time to help people on various newsgroups and discussion groups. Until recently was a total mac evangalist, however someone asked for peoples real life experiences of OS X Server and I told him the truth. At the moment I have a server that is next to useless and I know by other peoples posts that they are in the same boat. I have also never had a problem with Windows 2000 servers. If you have experienced differently then that is what this thread is for, not lets bash the new guy, he isn't supporting macs 100% and dares to say a pro word for microsoft.

In server situations I feel when you weigh up all the different catagories, Windows 2k beats both the 'traditional' Unix servers as well as OS X Servers. In the same way in a creative enviroment Mac workstations are much better than PCs.

I hardly feel I was out to cause trouble and flaming by writing what I hoped was an informative response.

Charles (deff not a troll) Astwood

Paco500 · Jul 10, 2001, 08:29 AM

Mr. Astwood makes some fine points, but as his problems are with a single server, I wouldn't call his findings typical. I have had problems with ASIP, WinNT, Win200, Solaris and Linux servers, all of which, taken indiviually, would want to make you swear off the OS forever. However, taken as a group, they are all pretty good.

Were I in your situation, I would probably go Mac OS X. Both Win2000 and OS X server have some very innovative advanced features (Active Directory, Windows Terminal Server on MS side, SLP, NetBoot, Web DAV, Net Info on OS X), but they can only be fully taken advantage of on their native platform.

I would guess your performance and reliability will be about the same, but you will be able to do more cool stuff with OS X. I am currently setting up a Middle School with OS X Server v.10.0.4 and Mac Manager 2 (approx 350 workstation clients) and I gotta tell you- it's cool.

Finally- while it should never be the promary basis of your decision, OS X is beautiful to look at and elegant to work with. I miss a lot about the OS 9 way of doing things, but I am delighting in each new discovery of the genius that went in to OS X.

$.02

- - e r i k - - · Jul 10, 2001, 08:41 AM

I suggest you take a look at the experiences MOSR has had: http://www.mosr.com/index.php?view=recent

Many readers have noticed that during our most recent server move a couple of months ago, we moved to a completely Mac OS X-based environment not only for our client machines, but also for our new in-house server. The 400MHz PowerMac G3 Blue&White we got from MacSolutions has served us well in that time, both impressing and frustrating us in turn. Here are a few of the insights we've gained in the process.

In the "wonders" category, Mac OS X is fast, stable, and secure. We've been subject to the usual array of pingfloods and attempts and denial-of-service, but so far none have done much to the server - only clogging up our line for a few hours at a time. Compared to the 400MHz Pentium II-based FreeBSD server we were using before, the Blue G3/400 is just as reliable and noticeably faster despite the fact that the G3 has only an ATA-33 hard disk and 128MB of SDRAM while the BSD machine had an Ultra SCSI disk and 384MB of memory.

Despite a few snags with Sendmail permissions when updating the machine from 10.0 to each of the successive 10.0.1-10.0.4 updates (easily fixed by performing "sudo chmod 755 /" at the command line), the machine has been generally quite stable as well. So far, we've seen no compelling reason to move to Apple's much more expensive Mac OS X Server distribution, although many of the things that Server includes have been taken care of for us by Tenon's wonderful iTools administration software and their friendly community of iTools users.
Unfortunately, along with the power of UNIX comes an order-of-magnitude increase in complexity when you find that you are experiencing a problem. We noticed that at times, for no apparent reason, the server was using nearly all of its CPU even while idle; it took us nearly a month to discover that this only occurred when no display was attached to the machine (called a "headless" configuration). The flip side of all that complexity is the fact than in the midst of all that complexity -- which all operating systems, have, really; with a UNIX-based OS we just get to look under the hood if we want -- the tools to handle it without waiting for Apple or anyone else to fix it for you are there, in ways they weren't with Classic. Simply by keeping a display connected to the video card during bootup, or by leaving a PC-to-Mac display adapter connected to convince the video card that a display was actually attached, we discovered the CPU drain disappears entirely, leaving the system typically 90% idle and the Login Window process stable. Several inquiries to Apple as to why "mach_init" and "loginwindow" were consuming half of the processor each when no monitor was present at bootup have gone unanswered - we assume it must be some kind of bug that causes the loginwindow process to continually restart itself in an infinite loop (every few seconds the loginwindow's process ID number would rachet up a notch, reaching the hundreds of thousands after a day or two, indicating that it was being rapidly quit and restarted).

This, of course, is very hard on the processor if there is no limitation made on the speed at which loginwindow can cycle in its infinite loop. Thankfully, Mac OS X is a great arbiter of resources under such heavy loads, and the site surprisingly suffered only very minor slowdowns before we finally nailed it down.

Another problem that has cropped up in the past two weeks and is still unaddressed, is that (again, for no apparent reason) at random intervals Rumors' index page will be cut off around halfway through its HTML source in transmission to readers, leaving the layout scrambled and the content abruptly cut off in mid-sentence. On the server side, the index.php file is intact and there are no visible symptoms of the problem. Restarting Apache, re-uploading index.php, twiddling with permissions, and countless similar UNIX debugging tricks have no effect; so far only restarting the computer seems to fix the problem.

This of course results in pesky two-minute-ish downtimes for our friend Papa Smurf; if you've had your connection to the site refused recently, now you know why.

So, as you can see, we're very pleased with the performance and security of the client distribution of Mac OS X, and found it a very easy transition from FreeBSD (far easier than our previous platform moves: first from SunOS to Mac OS 8 with WebTen, then to Linux, and from Linux to FreeBSD)....but there are a still a few bugs to be worked out. No doubt some of these are the product of our customization of OS X, but as in the case of the headless CPU drain, at least a couple seem to be caused by the OS itself. To put all of this in perspective, it was just plain wicked easy to get all of the twenty-plus services we needed (ftp, ssh, Apache, PHP4, MySQL, sendmail, DNS, perl, Applescript CGI, etc.) set up, administer them with iTools and a little command-line trial-and-error, and keep them running smoothly 99% of the time. The problems we've encountered have been largely transient, and fixed with relative ease. UNIX may add a degree of complexity to the system, but it also opens up a massive toolkit for debugging and dealing with problems that come up....in ways that are simply impossible with operating systems like OS 9, which doesn't let users manipulate the system at such a low level.

As time goes on, we plan to talk more about our experiences in a 100% OS X environment on both the client and server ends of the equation. If you have experiences you'd like to share, or questions you'd like us to answer about our set-up, drop us a line!

CremerK · Jul 10, 2001, 08:45 AM

I would agree with Paco500.

I do work in an extremely large IT organization and administer tons of NT 4 boxes and a couple of 2000s. 2000 is an amazing improvement over NT 4, but the main features it offers over OS X only apply to a large, all-Windows environment.

The things that are important to you, which are probably file, web and database serving, are performed much better by OS X than 2000. Now if you needed the complexity of Exchange and Active Directory, you would need 2000 - but it's probably not worth it in your environment.

plaidpjs · Jul 10, 2001, 10:43 AM

Just for starters, you should look at the OSX vs. Win2000 deathmatch conducted by C|Net, one of the largest Windows supporters in the known world. Surprisingly enough they came out in favor of OS X!

Next, while I think it is clear that everyone sees some benefits for running a Win2000 Server in a large, all Windows, environment, when it comes to crossplatform integration OS X is the winner hands down.

About the only negative i can see in regard to your choice when it relates to OS X is purchase. apple has decided to go two ways with licensing the new Server product, one a 10-client and the other an unlimited-client. In an evironment like yours, where there are more than 10 users who will needed simultaneous afp access to the machine, you are forced into buying the more expensive version of the software. of course, given what is included with OSXS, the dollar figure becomes very inconsequential when compared to the amount of proprietary goodies you'd have to pick up from MS to do the same things, all of which have their own costs.

As to my personal experiences, I currently have three servers running OSXS v10. I haven't had a significant glitch on any of the machines I use, a B&W G3/400, and two G4/500 Server configured machines. I uses two as load-balancing web servers and the third is essentially the monitoring and config machine (i.e., it runs afp and allows access to different shares for local users, it is the parent netInfo server for the internal network, and it is the back-up DNS server for the network). It is also the mail server, but, as I needed the ability to host multiple domain e-mails and allow for overlapping user names, I use a CommuniGate Pro installation instead of the OSXS mail server. However, in a single domain structure, the supplied mail server is more than adequate.

Ciao!

geekstud · Jul 10, 2001, 11:57 PM

Originally posted by theboss:


I am planning on moving a company for whom I consult from NT to OS X in the fall/winter timeframe, though the majority of their workstations remain windows (though perhaps not for too long).

It's tough to find advisors with no bias, but hopefully you can. Weigh your past experiences with info you collect about OSX servers. Also, check Apple's webpages for success stories of people in similar situations.

Perjhaps more importantly, check Apple's discussion forum for the real life trials of those of us that have already been through the migration that you are planning. No offence intended, but you need to open your eyes to reports of the bad news as well as the good news.

For example, the report by the poster you believe to be a troll regarding Appleshare File Services has been confirmed by many, many other users of Mac OS Server 1.2. This issue was confirmed in my own experience migrating a company from an NT 4 platform to a G4 running Server 1.2. The AFS desktop db bug is a very real, very nasty problem on an otherwise rather nice server solution. When working well, the server can really pump the bits out to the clients. But when the system is hammered by the runaway desktop db bug... sad users indeed. Apple never released a fix for the problem, only some suggested work arounds which involve system downtime; it is reasonable to note this lack of software support.

My hope is that the new Server version has fixed the filesharing issue, but only time will tell. It would seem rather early in the product life of the new OS release to be betting the (server) farm on it at this point.

Cheers,

-Nathan

lapinos · Jul 11, 2001, 02:40 AM

OK, then is there another known bug than the AFS desktop db bug? Is that bug coming from upgraded Server 1,2 versions?
Do you haveaddresses of Apple discussion forums that contain good & bad experiences?
In my case, where the server will primarily be a fileserver for a dozen Macs (design work: 100 MB photoshop files, websites & CD-ROM prototypes) and a pair of W2k & NT boxes, i guess that I am well far from X Server's operational limits, right?

Charles Astwood · Jul 11, 2001, 03:11 AM

Originally posted by lapinos:
OK, then is there another known bug than the AFS desktop db bug? Is that bug coming from upgraded Server 1,2 versions?
Do you haveaddresses of Apple discussion forums that contain good & bad experiences?
In my case, where the server will primarily be a fileserver for a dozen Macs (design work: 100 MB photoshop files, websites & CD-ROM prototypes) and a pair of W2k & NT boxes, i guess that I am well far from X Server's operational limits, right?

The desktopdb bug was the only one I found in 1.2. Apart from that Samba was a bit of a nightmare to configure to get the Windows Clients to work. However the new version 10.0.x has a very bad bug where people are finding their clients stalling for several minutes at a time, in my case very frequently. Look at http://discussions.info.apple.com/We...^0@.ef0cf13/44 for this.

I would also add the 'deathmatch' I seem to remember was for client versions of windows 2000 and os x. Servers are a completly different kettle of fish.

Until Apple start to take producing an enterprise server seriously and get out of the mentality of seeing how fast they can get Photoshop running I my opinion (and thats all it is an opinion before I get accused of trolling again) in a real world enviroment, based on my experience, as much as I love the Macs and always will, stick with another platform for servers.

macvillage.net · Jul 11, 2001, 11:15 AM

I would go with OSX, and here are my reasons:

1. Your 90% mac, so you won't really be using any Windows 2000 features, just the core stuff (filesharing etc.)
2. The Desktop DB bug most likely is something you can live with until it is fixed. Most likely you will be taking the server down for an hour or so once a month for a Disk First Aid scan and maybe even a Norton Disk Scan and Defrag to ensure your server is running as good as it can. Why not just do a quick rebuilding of the desktop during that time? It doesn't take that long.
3. Most hackers can take out a Windows 2000 server in a few minutes. There are many utilities that would allow anyone in your company who wants revenge to take you out quick. Mac OS X is much more secure.
4. Most viruses are windows. With everyone puting files on that server, you are always hoping that your network is not recieving anything it shouldn't. The last thing you need is someone unknowingly saving a trojan horse to that server. Mac OS X has only a few viruses.
5. Windows servers (hardware) aren't really cheaper. Dells are cheap, but have aweful problems with heat due to bad design. Most companies who run windows 2000 run high end Compaq, IBM servers, or HP. All of which really run about 3 grand anyway. So it's not really hardware price that you should judge on.

So in my modest opinion, I would go with Mac OS X.

lapinos · Jul 12, 2001, 05:45 AM

Yep, I think OS X Server has a good chance.
I have now the opportunity to play with an installed G4/400....
Wow, fast, reliable, stable....
We can reach the max 100Mbps network capacity, 9.3MB/s with a finder copy (from X to 9.1) of a 100 MB file...
I am now tryint the stability and resistance to stress of that test server.

More about it later...

For thse who are used to NT - X connexion, I opened a new thread called NT to X: The network name cannot be found

any input welcome.

greg