[PLUG] I wonder if I can find an opinion here...

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Tue Jul 18 17:45:55 UTC 2006


On Tue, 18 Jul 2006, Ronald Chmara wrote:

> c) and now they're on to OSX's Mach/Darwin/BSD/NextOS/Gnu stack, and 
> their server line takes up one rack height unit, but sounds like a 
> 747 and requires some severe rack *depth*.
> 
> It's almost as if Apple just had an aversion to using *nix variants 
> that anybody else *liked*.

It's not *that* bad...

Just about any 1U server is loud; the form factor forces those tiny 
fans to spin so quickly. I've got Apples, Dells, Penguins, and others 
in the server room at work; they're all loud compared to an average 2U 
unit.

The PowerPC Xserve machines all have decent support for serial 
consoles; their Samba and OpenLDAP implementations work and play well 
with both Windows and Linux; and Apple has done a reasonable job of 
documenting the command-line equivalents of the GUI tools:

 * OS X 10.3.x:
   http://www.apple.com/server/pdfs/Command_Line.pdf

 * OS X 10.4.x:
   http://images.apple.com/server/pdfs/Command_Line_v10.4_2nd_Ed.pdf

I have three main beefs:

1. GUI Administration vs. ASCII Config Files

Apple's BSD underpinnings are mostly well-behaved. The hard part is 
getting the GUI to work and play well with ASCII config files. I like 
to keep configuration files in a Subversion repository and push into 
production via cfengine.

But ... the minute I open the administrative GUI for any given daemon, 
the GUI will parse and re-write the config file, often removing 
comments or directives it doesn't understand (even if the underlying 
daemon *does* understand them).

Then again, this isn't so much different from using GUI controls on 
Linux boxes. It's tough to mix and match administrative techniques.

2. Launch Manager

The hardest part for me to understand continues to be the launch 
manager. Apple's developers are trying to depart from both the BSD and 
System V init methods -- and I think they've got a ways to go before 
the system will mature.

That said, there have been rumblings in the Linux community about the 
shortcomings of the traditional init systems. Parallelization is a big 
topic, as are the increasing difficulties of getting daemons 
initialized in the correct order. The Gentoo rc-update system is 
another attempt to solve these problems in non-traditional ways.

3. Lack of Unified Package Management

Apple provides fairly timely updates for Unix utilities near the core 
of the system (httpd, smbd, etc.) -- but there's no vendor-approved, 
integrated way to add other *nix applications to the system.

You end up using fink, Portage, or DarwinPorts, all of which exist 
outside Apple's own package system. I've read rumors that Apple is 
addressing the problem, but so far it's just rumors.

-- 
Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> www.madboa.com



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