| Tuesday, November 16, 2004 |
09:51 - Y'all're a bunch of enablers, is what you are
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/tiger/
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We're thinking about consolidating all the various power-sucking rack-mounted computers in our garage, including our main house server, into a single machine running Mac OS X Server. This seems like a no-brainer, as I've got my old G4 sitting in there, currently serving as nothing more than a backup target disk, and Panther Server has all the infrastructure and tools for it to fulfill all the functions of a UNIX server, a Windows domain controller, and a Mac file server, all wrapped up in a slick-as-hell package with a Server Admin tool that makes things like DNS and Apache and Samba configuration ridiculously easy. Honestly, now that we've made this decision, I can't wait.
But there's a choice to make: either we get Panther Server now, or we wait until sometime next year (they claim 1H04, which probably means June 30) when Tiger Server comes out. There's no upgrade discount, so we'd have to buy it all over again... and it looks like a pretty hefty upgrade. More so than Tiger over Panther on the desktop, even.
• iChat Server. Host your own private and secure inside-the-firewall iChat server that uses your own namespace and works with both Tiger’s iChat AV and popular Jabber clients available on Windows, Linux and PDAs.
• Weblog Server. Host your own Weblog server, featuring calendar-based navigation and customizable themes. User can post using either a web browser or blog clients that support XML-RPC or the ATOM API.
• Software Update Server. Reduce network costs by controlling the distribution of Apple software updates with your own Apple software update proxy/cache server.
• Mobile Home Directories. Centrally manage mobile users’ home directories with Tiger Server. When they reconnect to the network, mobile home directories automatically synchronize to the server.
Heh! Apple's written a blog server. How 'bout that, huh? Included with every Mac OS X Server installation is a complete blog-hosting suite, with all the usual commenting/navigation features, including a client app for posting (presumably only from Macs, but we'll see). Apparently it's not something they just wrote from scratch (it's based on Blojsom), but they've Mac-ified it until it squeaks.
Which is what they've done with all these tools. I'm really looking forward to poking around at configuring all these UNIX tools that I've only seen through half-developed, poorly documented text-config-file interfaces. In fact, I'm looking forward to it enough that I think we'll go ahead and get Panther Server right now. I don't wanna wait.
Just being able to shut down all those redundant rack-mount servers will probably pay for it in a couple of months anyway...
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Brian Tiemann
