Re: [OT]: Mailman availability
Re: [OT]: Mailman availability
- Subject: Re: [OT]: Mailman availability
- From: Paul McCann <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 09:53:33 +1030
Chris Espinosa wrote...
>
FYI, the set intersection between "unixesque" and "Apple-branded OS" has
>
been non-empty for about 14 years, since Apple first shipped A/UX (AT&T
>
System V with BSD 3.2 extensions), followed by AIX and Mac OS X Server.
>
The BSD personality in Mac OS X will actually be Apple's fourth
>
unixesque OS, and the eighth overall on Apple hardware (if you count
>
Unisoft's Lisa UNIX, Tenon's MachTen, Linux/PPC, and BeOS for Mac).
Hey, I knew about all bar MAE (mentioned by Chuq), and should have dredged
at least A/UX up from my mind. Thanks for the clarification (I should
definitely have spent more time qualifying that sentence about apple branded
unix OS's.) Somewhere on the snail-trail of my web usage there's a thread
containing info about AU/X, and even how to get it *now*. Aaaaaah, gotcha:
http://www.macslash.com/article.pl?sid=01/02/16/2315207&mode=thread
(Don't ask me re the legality of the suggested approaches.)
I had systematically repressed all memory of Mac OS X Server, having used
it for about 6 months early last year to netboot a dozen desktop imacs
without using their hard drives. *Not* a pleasant subject, and Chuq's
comment "The biggest problems Apple's had with Unix is lack of commitment
and followthrough from the execs." is *spot on* re this one. Fantastic
potential, but some aspects of this OS were truly, and literally (for the
poor administrator of said system) embarrassing. Noteable incidents among
which were the **hard** server crashes due to what the kernel took to be,
ahem, dirty tapes! Not hard to work around once you know what's going on,
but still mega-vexing. Add to that the merry fun of the "Desktop DB Bug",
where you get the Desktop DB process taking up 50%, no wait--there's more,
90%, 99% of the CPU, and no-one can do a thing. Kill it off, run disk
cleansers, start again, sit around and hope that it doesn't come back too
soon. Oh boy! Then there was printing from acrobat reader, and.... (stop me
now...). As a pure web-serving platform OS X Server was a delight, but given
the configuration of the G4 that we'd had to create to run the server with
netbooting it was more than a little overkill for such a task. So the one
happy outcome of the process is that I'm typing this on said G4.
Pathetic attempt to put this all back on a scripting track. One of the weird
aspects of Mac OS X Server was that a desktop would appear littered with
various disks, personal folders and desktop printers, making a horrible
mess. Applescript to the rescue thinks me, and away I go to write a script
to relocate the dross to a hidden location in the user folder (not having
mounted the local hard drive), and give the desktop something of a makeover.
Blat! No can do. End of a long story: user didn't have permissions to change
things I needed changed. This particular piece of madness ended with a
script that piled everything up in the one spot behind a DragThing palette,
out of all but the curious user's way. Can someone say "yuck"?
Cheers,
Paul