Hacker News Reader

Comment by commandshift90 | Hacker News Reader

Definitely targeted at the enterprise, but it's entirely possible to provision and operate a single instance without any kind of enterprise-level agreement.

View on HN

Was there any work done around OS X support or are there licensing issues there / not enough support from Enterprise?

OS X licensing for off-prem machines is a tricky thing, and the technology being used for streaming complicates it further, if I recall.

Thanks for answering! Other providers for OS X solutions are super dodgy / shutdown / involve time sharing (no imaging, you store everything into a personal Dropbox).

I ask about OS X support as the requirement for OS X to run Xcode kills a lot of iOS development workshops as the cost is to high / device availability is low.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer.

As a (primarily) iOS developer by trade, I feel your pain. There are colocation operations that seem to do well. They involve racks and racks of Mac minis hanging out in a datacenter somewhere -- since it's Apple hardware, it's totally acceptable within OS X licensing terms. It costs more, of course, but it might be a valuable investment to an operation that relies on a volume of machines to be available and shareable while staving off concerns about wear and tear.

The standard, and original, is: https://macminicolo.net

I'm sure there are others.

Awesome thank you!

I'm with MacStadium and we just acquired Macminicolo. Let me know if you have any questions. We've got large enterprise customers, developer shops, and popular SaaS tools like Travis CI using our dedicated rented Mac servers and Mac private cloud platform.

I don't believe there is anything like RDP built into OSX, so I don't forsee anything like this for apple any time soon.

There is. The feature is called "Screen Sharing."

Apple's included screen sharing tool is a Mac-specific solution. At MacStadium, we provide iRAAP server on our dedicated Mac servers for customers connecting from Windows computers; it allows for RDP access to the remote Mac.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com