For anyone still listening I would like to say that it is my right
to lose confidence if I cant get it to work. I dont need an uber
admin bully telling me to get a different job to reinforce it. And
Apple - neither do you - get back to making Leopard Server great as
fast as possible please before people like me give up.
Speaking only for myself, I think that Leopard server is an
improvement over the previous OS/X server version, in that I have
actually been able to get almost everything I've attempted with it to
work.
However, I came to OS/X server from over two decades of small-scale
BSD* server administration, and I had expectations about it that I
have come to understand simply aren't true. If you want to use the GUI
exclusively or near-exclusively, then there are things you probably
won't be able to do, that you can do, even fairly easily, on other
server platforms. (If you don't care about using the GUI, then I
question the cost/benefit value of the server software, at least for a
small lab like ours.)
I started with Tiger and went in and started editing configuration
files, installing scripts, and all that, to try to make it do what I'd
been doing with FreeBSD. However, after system upgrades the scripts
would stop working for mysterious reasons and there were strange
interactions with the GUI adminstrative interface that took lots of
time to track down, if I could even track things down. So I eventually
gave up on Tiger server and just used the machine as a local file
server and kept on using the aging FreeBSD servers until I got my
hands on Leopard.
With Leopard, I made the conscious decision to stay within the bounds
of the OS/X GUI worldview, which meant changing the hardware,
software, and network architecture of our lab to be compatible with
it. I'm almost done with the set-up (I can't work on it full time, I'm
actually more of a researcher than a computer system administrator),
but so far, so good. The full change-over will be happening within the
next couple of weeks. Almost everything I've done has been via the GUI.
My main observation is that the GUI is very unfriendly to people who
do things wrong the first time. Since I'm sort of feeling my way, I've
had to back out changes and re-do things, and that has created lots of
problems for me. It's probably a better policy to (1) plan everything
as best you can, but (2) if you realize you've set something up the
"wrong" way and the system is not cooperating with undoing whatever it
is, you'll be happier in the end if you write down all your notes and
start over again with a fresh install. Obviously, the further along
you are when you come to this eventuality, the more pissed off you'll
be.
There definitely seem to be bugs in the GUI, and that complicates
trying to understand what just went wrong: did you misunderstand
something, type something wrong, find a bug in the underlying system,
or is it just another Server Admin or Workgroup Manager bug or
limitation? It would really help if there was some way to click on an
"explain" button next to every field, menu item, and button in those
programs, that would tell you exactly which underlying configuration
files were being affected and how, along with a pointer to the
relevant passages in the documentation. But of course, there isn't.
Some sort of automatic backup/rewind/undo capability in the server
administration software would be a huge win: imagine a Cmd-Z style
functionality that could ultimately rewind the system back to a fresh
install. Perhaps a good integration of Time Machine with the server
could actually do that.
Oh, and I also got a couple of very helpful comments on this list to
specific questions I had. So don't give up yet.
Cheers,
Greg Shenaut
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