[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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