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Evangellydonut · Aug 7, 2001, 01:57 AM

Other than "its a mac", maybe someone can give enough persuasive reasons as to why I should make a server on Mac Hardware with X-server that's not yet "truely X"?
I'm going to get a server for a small company soon, and seems like Dual Athlon 1.33 with Raid 1 10,000 RPM SCSI and Linux (red hat or otherwise) is the way to go...The trouble of learning Linux is something every computer geek NEED to know, so I'd rather learn it now than later, so any other reasons? sowwy if it sounds like flame-bait...

suhail · Aug 7, 2001, 07:00 AM

OS X Server is easier to setup and use than RedHat. OS X does have a few bugs in the installation process, but otherwise, it is a solid OS. It is also easier to administer, generate email accounts, and do FTP. The good thing about that is you don't have to rush to your clients site every time something goes wrong, you'll probably be able to guide them through the phone.

OS X Server can also serve Macs, PCs, and UNIX workstations, it can do NetBooting (Not an easy task), run Linux apps, has Apache with Perl extension, easy to setup CGIs, serves multiple sites with simple checkbox buttons, can use multiple etherner cards, has an extensive Network Utility, and you can drag and drop from/to the terminal.

You would still need to learn Linux, but not that much, once you get into CGI, you'll need to learn chmod and other Linux commands.

Another reason, is that OS X comes with QuickTime Streaming Server, which can stream according to a connections speed. QTS serves upto 2000 (plus/minus) simultaneous connections, if you were to get REAL-Server, you'll need to dishout over $20,000. It is true, that you could also get QuickTime Streamer to run on the Windows version of Darwin, but it is not as intuative, and you must have Perl running in a dedicated DOS terminal.

Anyway, here are my 2c, I've been using OS X Server, and been mostly satisfied, RedHat is also a very good Server though, but I think in the longer run OS X Server is going to be more successful.

Evangellydonut · Aug 7, 2001, 01:29 PM

Say i get a Linux server for now, since cost is a major concern for a small company, and Dual Athlons seem to be the most cost-effective. Then, say I get a OS X server next (after OS X and OS X server 2.0 matures), and eventually a 2K-server or equivalent. How hard would it be to have the 3 servers work in harmony? 'course each would have its own purpose, but i don't think each can be 100% independent. Also, would it be WAY too much trouble to maintain 3 different server platforms? (as in more than 1 person's full time job, who also need to maintain all other computer related stuff)

dtriska · Aug 7, 2001, 04:14 PM

Originally posted by Evangellydonut:
Say i get a Linux server for now, since cost is a major concern for a small company, and Dual Athlons seem to be the most cost-effective. Then, say I get a OS X server next (after OS X and OS X server 2.0 matures), and eventually a 2K-server or equivalent. How hard would it be to have the 3 servers work in harmony? 'course each would have its own purpose, but i don't think each can be 100% independent. Also, would it be WAY too much trouble to maintain 3 different server platforms? (as in more than 1 person's full time job, who also need to maintain all other computer related stuff)

First, you need to let us know what tasks each server would be responsible for. We also need to know the platform of the third server.

If the platforms are alike (for example, Unix variants), there should be little difficulty in maintaining the servers as they operate in similar fashions.

The real deciding factor will probably be how the servers relate to each other. Are they sharing user and group info? Or, are they performing separate functions, and therefore do not need to communicate?

Evangellydonut · Aug 8, 2001, 05:26 PM

Originally posted by dtriska:

First, you need to let us know what tasks each server would be responsible for. We also need to know the platform of the third server.

If the platforms are alike (for example, Unix variants), there should be little difficulty in maintaining the servers as they operate in similar fashions.

The real deciding factor will probably be how the servers relate to each other. Are they sharing user and group info? Or, are they performing separate functions, and therefore do not need to communicate?

lets assume for now that the 3rd machine is W2K-server, and will be sharing user and group info. How much more complicated would it be to interface the different platforms together? (estimate factor, say 2x more work? 3x more work?) I'm JUST getting into servers, so bare with me here, thx ^^;

CityGuy2003 · Aug 9, 2001, 03:09 PM

i have used os x server only a few times, but my experience with it was good. i think after 10.1 is released and os x server is updated to match it will be what most people need. i read a very good review of the os x server at macuser uk <www.macuser.co.uk>, my problem with it at this point is that it is bundled with comparably "low-end" G4's. according to the apple store the fastest configuration is dual 533mhz. if you went with it, instead of buying the hardware and software already bundled i would buy a built to order mac (start with the 733mhz, and the upgrade the processor to dual 800's) get third party ram, and then buy os x server from the apple store (software section) and install it yourself. if you choose the 10-user license, total your cost will be 3098, if you choose the unlimited-license your cost will be 3598, both of which are less than the "high-end" pre-packaged g4 server running dual g4 at 533mhz

CityGuy2003 · Aug 9, 2001, 03:11 PM

one more thing...if you do what i suggested above, not only will you get a faster machine, but you'll get the new QS case instead of the graphite case which apple still sells for the pre-packaged server

utidjian · Aug 12, 2001, 11:43 AM

Originally posted by Evangellydonut:


lets assume for now that the 3rd machine is W2K-server, and will be sharing user and group info. How much more complicated would it be to interface the different platforms together? (estimate factor, say 2x more work? 3x more work?) I'm JUST getting into servers, so bare with me here, thx ^^;

I would recommend the Linux solution (for now). I have been running a network of approx 100 Mac, Windows, and Linux clients for the past two+ years. Leaving aside various religious feelings people have about the clients they prefer... I will just discuss the server side... based on TCO, reliability, flexibility, scalability, support, and completeness of solution. The aforementioned criteria are the things that matter on a server... while "userfriendly" may be a factor for some it goes without saying that a well setup server is transparent to the users and not much work for the administrator.

Linux integrates seamlessly in to a heterogenous network of Macs and Windows PCs for network services. We curently use Samba and the latest version of netatalk for serving files to Windows and Mac clients. We use NFS and NIS for serving to *nix clients. All of this was trivial to set up and is easy to administer. We export the /home partition from the server to the clients. In this way a user has access to all their data regardless of platform. We also mirror all of /home to a second set of hard disks each day (the second set is RAID0) and then back that up to tape.

We used to use OS-X as a server but got fed up with Apples apparent lack of support and the cludgyness of the GUI admin tools. GUI admin tools are all very nice until one wants to do something the creator of the tool did not anticipate. They also do not lend themselves to batch processing... such as adding 400 users at the beginning of each semester. There was no practical and solid backup solution for tape backup. At the time, there was no practical way to hook up the server to a "smart" UPS... I don't know if this problem has been solved yet but with frequent power "blinks" it gets to be a real problem. Any power loss over an hour and we have the problem that the filesystem may be corrupted because there is no way to shutdown the server gracefully.

A dual Athlon 1.3GHz is way overkill for a simple file, mail, web server. We run ours on dual PPros 200MHz and 128M of RAM. A dual Athlon board is one of the most expensive one can get these days. Unless you are doing some very heavy database crunching then a lower end machine will work fine. The CPU horsepower and RAM belongs in the workstations. If you are going to use some heavy databases I would consider a separate machine for just that and not have it serving files and whatnot to your clients.

A server solution is not complete until you add in the cost of a good UPS and tape backup solution. These can easily add $1K-$3K to the total cost. I recommend DLT tapes for backup, very reliable. I also recommend hardware RAID5 for the main array instead of RAID1. RAID1 is slower than RAID5 and doubles the cost of capacity. I use cheap IDE software RAID0 for mirrored backups and then transfer that to tape.

Linux has excellent support for all commodity hardware and peripherals. OS-X does not. Linux also has excellent support for all network protocols and filesystems. OS-X does but I found the support from Apple to be a sore point. Linux + Samba can integrate seamlessly in to an NT/W2K domain. It is very easy to set up... nothing more than change a couple of lines in the smb.conf file and restart Samba... yer done. I don't know if it as simple on OS-X. It should be.

Anyhow... after having non-answers to issues from Apple about problems with OS-X server we have switched to Linux on x86 and have never looked back.

geekstud · Aug 13, 2001, 12:55 AM

Originally posted by utidjian:


A server solution is not complete until you add in the cost of a good UPS and tape backup solution. These can easily add $1K-$3K to the total cost. I recommend DLT tapes for backup, very reliable. I also recommend hardware RAID5 for the main array instead of RAID1. RAID1 is slower than RAID5 and doubles the cost of capacity. I use cheap IDE software RAID0 for mirrored backups and then transfer that to tape.

There's one nit to pick in this otherwise excellent post: using the same disks, RAID1 (aka mirroring) is generally faster than RAID5 for writing, and can be faster for reading if used in combination with RAID0 (aka striping). RAID5, even with hardware acceleration, has to deal with intensive calculations to perform writes; mirroring is a much less intensive process.

-Nathan

utidjian · Aug 13, 2001, 02:20 AM

Originally posted by geekstud:


There's one nit to pick in this otherwise excellent post: using the same disks, RAID1 (aka mirroring) is generally faster than RAID5 for writing, and can be faster for reading if used in combination with RAID0 (aka striping). RAID5, even with hardware acceleration, has to deal with intensive calculations to perform writes; mirroring is a much less intensive process.

-Nathan

Ummm yep. You are correct.