Re: Beginner Questions

On Oct 17, 2007, at 8:56 AM, Jason Pruim wrote:

On Oct 16, 2007, at 5:51 PM, Allyen Wilson wrote:

I have a small company with 2 employees and 4 full-time contractors. I want to start using Leopard server (running on a dedicated G5 Powermac with Airport only network) primarily for file sharing, document library, and internal wiki etc. Not for email, website hosting etc. Will I see any file sharing performance increase using server over the computer to computer sharing I use now? At this point Leopard server is not a critical business tool I just want to keep pushing my knowledge of all things mac. But I also hope that it will at least help things run a little faster and smoother. Any other benefits I could expect?

In addition, is there a book or website that you can recommend for non-IT professionals? My google efforts have not turned up much for novices.

On Oct 16, 2007, at 8:13 PM, Dan Shoop wrote:

That last part smells like a very bad idea. For one OS X Server requires good, real DNS so a WiFi network isolated from any other network is going to be problematic. Services over WiFi also are going to perform poorly. And the latency will cause numerous problems. YMMV but expect it on the "poor" side.

Hi Allyen,

I can't speak for leopard since I don't even have a developer copy, but I do something very similar with tiger server. Except I host AFP, SMB, FTP, iChat, Mail, Web, DNS, Pretty much the gammet of options. and I connect to the server via a wireless connection, my internal airport into a linksys wireless router. I don't have any issues accessing, the server except for 1 program (An accounting program) that apple didn't make is a little slow on some tasks.

For a single user it might be fine, but Dan has already pointed out some of the important cautions about going that route. 

Wireless access should not be considered an equivalent to wired connections, it's dismaying when I see (for example) small companies choose a wireless setup because they believe (falsely) it will be as good or that for some unkown reason, "wireless = better" .