andrew carter

I managed to get a PowerMac Dual 2.0 GHz G5 for a really good price (actually, a ridiculous price). I already have a PowerMac Dual 2.7 GHz G5 as my main development machine. For my subversion/trac server, I had been running on an old Dell Pentium III 600 running FreeBSD or Ubuntu at various times over its life. The Dual 2.0 G5 seems like a possible successor as my server. It would add way more horsepower and already has more disk space before I even add a second hard drive. It’s also an opportunity to try out Mac OS X 10.4 Server

I’ve had this machine for a couple months. I’ve played with Linux on it a little bit. Ubuntu ran nicely. It would be a good choice for the server. Or Debian. But I don’t know how well either one takes advantage of the Mac hardware.

My ADC account gives me access to Tiger Server builds. So I decided to at least test drive it before I decide what to do with the machine and what to put on it. I’ve never used Mac OS X Server before. I love the specs on the Xserve hardware and could see using a small rack of them in the future. Therefore, good reason to get familiar with Tiger Server.

So far, the install is very similar to normal Tiger. There is a nice set of server applications that are impressive. I have become well versed in command line/config file management of most of the typical open source stack. I certainly can appreciate the added benefits of good GUI based tools. In particular, the Apache manager app looks very slick.

There are some things I still need to get through:

• Apache is version 1.3. There is an “experimental” 2.0 build on it but from what I’ve read, it isn’t really supported or expected to be used. This means DarwinPorts for Apache 2 (and subversion). Guess I won’t use that nice looking apache tool after all.
• The certificate manager added to Keychain is nice. Although the openssl calls aren’t that hard, a gui certificate tool is appreciated. It also guides you through creating your own root CA.
• Not sure how I feel about running a full Aqua gui on my server. I’m surprised that Apple didn’t remove more stuff. For example, iTunes and Dashboard. It’s disappointing to see them have non-server software in there. Microsoft does the same thing with Windows Server. I never liked that either. I’ve gotten used to creating ultra-slim FreeBSD or Linux server images.
• I am interested in using OpenDirectory but I’m afraid of messing up my desktop and Powerbook. I also don’t totally get how the network home directories work. In particular, what is the experience on my powerbook? Besides, what’s the major benefit of sharing all my files from machine to machine? Why would I have more than one computer in that case?
• The OS X server community is small. Luckily, it shares many of the same software with *BSD/Linux so it’s not isolated. But finding direct info on OS X server is more work. I did find two recommended books on Amazon so I’ll get those to help me out.

I do have to say that after spending an entire evening on it, I don’t have my apache2/subversion/trac install up and running yet. The big reason is I had trouble getting ssl going. If I didn’t want SSL, I would have been done. I’m wondering if it might have been easier to use a regular Tiger install with DarwinPorts.