MacOS Sierra Server
apple.com
apple.com
From the copy "The server for everyone.
macOS Server is perfect for a small studio, business, or school. And it’s so easy to use, you don’t need your own IT department."
And
"Small studios, retail shops, even home-based businesses can all benefit. It’s simpler than ever for people without much networking experience to set up and host macOS Server. "
So yeah - If you've heard of devops or need to spec out BTU and rack space for your servers this is not for you.
The only thing the Apple announcements have going for them are that multiple herds are clashing.
I'd have thought most smaller companies that don't want to do cloud hosting, would be better off with a NAS system, like the ones from Synology..
I guess Mini is the expectation, but it's really a "oh no" feeling to buy something running 2 year old hardware for that price, and for a server it also lacks dual drives (and no quad-core since 2012).
I have a standard desktop mac mini which has been fitted with 2 drives by using this kit[0] so it's certainly possible.
The issue I have is that I don't like running anything mission critical without ECC memory.
[0]: https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/Mac-Mini-Dual-Drive-Kit/IF1...
There has to be a license change coming, or new hardware, or this is just . . . wow.
Still haven't found an effective way to manage OSX clients in a Windows domain. Password expiration is a nightmare.
As a developer, my laptop alone is often both client and server and yet I wouldn't recommend anybody run their 24x7 business services on it.
It's all about the SLA.
I found that clang did super weird things under VirtualBox though (I know, wrong host software for this...) and needed to be patched for anything to build.
- Redundant power supplies: Connect multiple USB-C power adapters. Bonus built in UPS battery backup!
- Redundant network interfaces: Connect multiple USB-C Ethernet adapters and/or PCI-E NIC in an external enclosure.
- Separate management port: Not as comprehensive as a DRAC or iLOM but it can be setup to provide some of the same features.
- Security: Various options available for locking down a MacBook or alternatively just use a rack with lockable doors.
We used to run corporate email server in the 90s with thousands of users, and they had 8GB memory and 2 processors - same as a Mac Mini. And their processors were slower than today's with slow hard drives, not the SSDs of today.
None of the services Mac OS X Server does is compute intensive.
A laptop? with 16 gigs of ram?
Great, what about redundant power supplies? dual network?
nope thought not.
Let me guess? still can't [legally] virtualize it on non apple hardware right?
A Mac Pro addresses your concerns a bit better but there is a larger price tag.
I have used Mini's for servers for years and they hold up pretty well.
(putting aside under powered/poor storage)
My Mac Pro still feels very useful to me. I use it daily as my main machine. I may consider upgrading the SSD to a TB when the prices come down.
So in theory you could add redundant power supplies and dual wired network connections and it has a built in UPS in case of power outage, maybe.
Maybe not, 'tis a silly idea.
Maybe it's a sign that Apple are considering releasing server grade hardware again in the future ...but probably not that either.
Each one comes with a built-in KVM console, and boy does it look good! Finally, no more pushing that cart with a 17" CRT around the data center so you can use vi in a 40x80 console. These laptop servers have retina screens, baby.
Only one question should stand between you and outfitting your data center with MBPs: Space Gray or Silver?
Server hardware is very expensive, and workstation or server class GPU hardware is not cheap either. Mac Pros are not the best price/performance ratio in that class, but they are (even now) within reason.
Just because something photographs well, it doesn't mean that caution was thrown to the wind just to get something pretty. It's a datacenter after all, it's meant to facilitate a task. The rationale behind imgix deploying Mac Pros in a datacenter environment was pragmatic and based on certain fixed technical requirements.
Money doesn't equal success. It may mean you have more at your disposal and can be more wasteful to get to your goals but if your idea isn't sound and nobody pays you lose anyway.
I wonder how many tons of TNT of energy are contained within a rack full of 152 LiPo batteries...
[1] http://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/ [2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=76+watt+hours+in+tons+o...
(In a previous life, I have cut the handles off a mac pro to make it fit in a normal rack....)
Which means I can't shove it in the server room, monitor it, use UPS properly, and its all limited to 1 gig ethernet.
Most small businesses never have to worry about the problems that come from outgrowing their IT infrastructure.
10GE ThunderBolt NICs are a thing. Alternatively you could use a ThunderBolt PCI-E enclosure.
Used to run a web server on it as well, but now I have a much faster separate Skylake Xeon FreeBSD machine behind the router/firewall, with terabytes of image data. I can server Django pages in about 350us, from home.
Every web developer should have a home static IP address and OS X server. It's just so much better than Gmail or cloud providers. OS X Server has so many services available in it, including file sharing, messaging, and VPN, and the Server GUI is so much easier to manage than any other Unix system. I expect the services offered by it to grow over time (family photo sharing maybe?)
Edit: Also, OS X Server isn't anything at all like the Linux/Unix home servers that people are complaining about. You're not supposed to tinker with it at all or learn about the intricacies of PostFix or SMTP or spam filters or VMs or containers. All of it's details are hidden from you - it literally has an 'ON/OFF' button for each service. It's not a hobbyist thing at all. It really is a Zero-knowledge 'set-it-and-forget-it' system. If you are spending more than an evening on it, then you have already screwed up, and might as well stop using it.
Wait, if OS X Server is so awesome, why not run your web server on it?
> much faster
Oh. Oh, I see. Is the Mac Pro not fast enough? Because then you could run OS X Server to do your web serving.
Or a linux server running VMs and containers for all the same.
> ... and the Server GUI is so much easier to manage than any other Unix system.
Ummmm... that's a personal preference. I much prefer CL as I find it many times more productive.
If you already know how to tweak postfix, et al then OSX server probably isn't for you.
The caching server will make local access to your cloud photos faster. But, first the photos have to go through iCloud, so despite having a server with lots of storage running 24x7 you still need to pay apple for iCloud storage. Sigh.
So I went for Gmail with my own domain. No more spam, no more hassles dealing with span.
And for running my own services? File sharing: Dropbox. VPN: Nothing to VPN to.
What's better about running your own? I just got sick of managing it. OpenBSD, Debian, whatever I used, just broke in new and exciting ways every time I applied updates, meaning I had to spend time managing stuff that I could just hand off to others - and get for free/cheap.
It's great learning by managing your own server[s], but after so long doing it, I wouldn't want to continue without being paid to.
DynamicDNS works just as well, and without the extra charge/phone call to your ISP.
The Dell XPS goes to sleep when lid closed, and correctly (and fast) wakeup when you open the lid. Battery life amazing as well. So I just shut the laptop, and open it the next day and continue...
But who knows, maybe I missed a setting somewhere to correct that.
GNOME autodetects a high-DPI display and scales well by default, and all modern applications handle this as well. (If you run old non-toolkit applications, they may not scale automatically.) I did find that Firefox doesn't seem to autodetect high-DPI displays, but if you open about:config and set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.4 (for 1440p) or 2 (for 4k), Firefox works great. (Adjust to taste.)
It's not crashing all the time but yes I get some vague bugs that are resolved by restarting, clearing some files or simply compiling again. Not to mention Swift 2.3 in the last version of Xcode 7 isn't compiling Swift 2.3 code in Xcode 8.
But it's fast and the code completion works pretty well.
What makes you think this is going to happen sometime soon? Have you seen anything specific that indicates that?
As an iOS developer, I've got the experience to know this kind of drivel doesn't reflect reality. More then that though, I simply find it amusing how people here rush to judgment about a product they've never used, then circle the wagons. I guess it's not surprising, developers and entrepreneurs tend to be god-awful at understanding the needs of end users, tale as old as time. What's more concerning is that despite over 40 years of technical revolutions, attention to minor detail wins, and adoption/consideration of community input, industry "professionals" won't give Apple even the slightest hint of the benefit of the doubt.
But I do wonder about the empathy and humanity of people who say that Apple "doesn't care." They has over 125,000 employees worldwide, many of them hardware engineering, open-source software, and design veterans who know and are passionate about the work they do. Passionate enough to know about tradeoffs you make when shipping a successful product. Marginalizing these people simply because you've decided to switch to Desktop Linux reflects really poorly on you, not on the Touch Bar.
Nor does it get anything done, as time and time again Cupertino shows that the haters have less memory than a Nomad and are lame. Meanwhile, scores of developers will use the tbMBP, Xcode, and even iTunes Connect to do tons of productive things with their time. Maybe think of that next time you decide to lower the discourse +1 on every damn article.
Oh come on, HN is one of the most pro-Apple communities around. That still doesn't mean people can't criticise them when they do something they don't like.
k so you're at the center of Apple's attention. You're lucky. You perhaps don't need 32 Gig. Many of us do though, and 16 gig limit is just as nonsensical as it gets on a "Pro" computer and no amount of "oh this is getting old now please stop" is going to change the hard fact that Apple screwed up, or is dumping serious power users. I'm still angry, and I agree with the backlash. I want to toolup away from Apple as well. There is something useful to me in posts that show that I'm not alone, because it suggests a certain momentum towards alternatives, reducing my risk. There is also something very useful to Apple's competitors in gauging frustration as it may push them to create closer alternatives.
No, there really isn't anything useful in statistically insignificant samples, except to further your confirmation bias. Stats 101.
It's not like Apple will never offer a 32GB laptop. At most it's one refresh cycle behind.
Of course, Apple has screwed things up all along: Skeumorphic apps. Lack of repairability of devices. The howling, churning cesspool that is the iTunes UI.
But they do awesome things, usually on their own (with the help of a pile of money), with small teams, and that's pretty admirable.
But then we have the last couple of years, and it seems like stuff is going off the rails. This "server" thing is laughable without hardware to back it up. Office infrastructure (which this claims to be) needs to be run on hardware utterly different from any of Apple's current offerings. Oh, you can probably get away with running it on a spare laptop or mini or whatever, for a while. But anyone making their company financially dependent on this thing will eventually be let down, and hard, and that is going to suck.
Maybe next week Apple will announce a rack-mounted "pro" (or Apple's cool-but-screwy take on real server hardware) and everyone will breathe a sigh of relief that Apple hasn't gone full bull-goose crazy and left the tracks entirely, that there is someone at the helm who knows WTF they are doing. Could happen. Not holding my breath.
I guess Instagram would probably be profitable if it were on its own? Maybe Snapchat is? I don't know how companies like FiftyThree, Flipboard or Foursquare are doing, but you don't hear much about them any more?
This frustration is not sudden, it took time to build up. And I share this opinion with many of my colleagues and many other developers. This is similar to what happened to Windows and Microsoft thing which happened to Microsoft.
iOS development has been getting frustrating and Android is improving A LOT. AppStore search algorithm/flow is now so brutal that its getting very difficult for new developers to get a breakthrough.
From what I understand, I don't think macOS Server scales to large volumes of users.
The one component that any sized org can really benefit from is the caching server, which stores app store and OS updates on the local network so your 10 or 1000 machines aren't all saturating your internet connection. Even here, running it on a Mac Mini isn't that big of a deal as it is neither mission critical nor underpowered for this one task. And given the size, a mini almost fits anywhere.
For things like per-app-vpn you need to create custom payloads for each app: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/featu...
While searching for info about per-app VPNs, I found this guide for on-demand VPNs that are associated with specific web sites, https://www.derman.com/blogs/Setting-Up-iOS-OnDemand-VPN
Is this used in a business or family setting?
I could see this being useful for my family and their collection of iDevices.
1) It is intended for a small maybe even medium sized business, as far as the services go. For what you can do here for 20 dollars USD, its pretty great. File sharing, VPN, Contacts w/ a built in GAL, customizable Calendar, a relatively basic but useful intranet (Wiki) and the ability to host websites by basically dropping your folder of HTML/CSS/Python/PHP/Javascript code into a folder is very neat. Its also fairly trivial to setup a small mail server.
2) Ease of deployment. Goes along with number 1, but to specifically address those talking about a UPS and the need for other higher-end server fucntions. I DO NOT disagree :) However, it is, compared to a rackmount server, trivially inexpensive to setup a replica of a macOS Server. Just buy another mac mini, join the open directory to the existing master, and BOOM import your data. You know have a backup server. and you can do this dozens of times if needed. With a few button clicks, and, for what its worth, it also does some semblance of reasonable load balancing of the services too with you have replicas. Cool eh?
3) The real Gem here though is Profile Manager. Companies like Meraki/Airwatch/Microsoft charge an arm and a leg for mobile device management solutions that are basically clones of Profile Manager (with some exceptions. JAMF is pretty neat) Automatically enrolling devices into profile manager or now apple school manager is super simple, there is limited network setup you have to have, and it maintains itself very easily. This also lets you push tho VPP apps as well. And there is no per user cost. No per device cost. Profiling is just as robust as any other MDM solution like inTune Airwatch, MobileIron etc. Macs & iOS devices can be provisioned with zero touch enrollment. And soooooo much more. And no more apple IDs!
Have users on your AD or LDAP instance? Join the mac itself to that instance and flip on the open directory, and boom, you can use your AD/LDAP credentials for your mobile devices and macs.
All for under 800 bucks. Its a steal.
What about just installing this on a time-capsule instead?
You can already manage an OS X Server from a separate laptop.
Probably less stability risks.
I honestly don't know why anyone would use GMail.
And of course if you took a bit wider view to the security, it includes also being able to access the data. While Gmail has probably had some issues in the past, I still feel it is more reliable than the internet connection which I have at home. This becomes a factor especially when I need to access my emails while travelling (and there's nobody at home sorting out possible connection problems).
I would like to have both a laptop for on the go work, and a home desktop Mac. Ideally, these would share the same profile, or at least documents, bookmarks, etc. Several VMs; this is tricky because the laptop would not have all the hard disk space of the desktop, so I'd want to selectively sync these.
Is running OSX Server a solution? If so, would it be on a separate machine, or would (say) the desktop Mac run Server, a user profile there being able to be logged in locally, and synced with the laptop too?
That being said, I would physically separate the server, personally (not use it a daily-use machine).
Not too relevant, but I remember doing web-dev many years ago and was told to never turn off my workstation because it was also a DNS server for the whole company.
I know this is for your personal use, so YMMV.
Ie. The server can now act as network storage for your iCloud services (e.g. iCloud drive and photos). But, despite the fact that your server is now your preferred cloud storage you'll still need to pay Apple a monthly fee for iCloud storage.
The problem is I dont have a decent hardware to run this. I want a Time Capsule for iOS, or Airport Extreme like that runs OSX Servers.
We manage two schools on using Mac Server and the network profiles (like roaming profiles) bring everything to it's knees.
In one school - because Apple laptops are rather expensive, each student doesn't have their own laptop. Every time a class fires up and logs in - the 30 laptops saturate the GB network for about 5 minutes. Until the darn things are done churning, the students can't do any work.
And yes, we've done all the smart things - pruned home folders, SSDs, awesome WiFi. It used to take 20 minutes before.
I send construction workers out in the field with MacBooks because they're so rugged and the RDP client it awesome, and we really enjoyed Apples line of plastic MacBooks. At the time, they were a great value for schools. I love apple stuff generally - I'm typing this on a Macbook right now.
But I'm absolutely convinced that Apple will lose the lower education space entirely in the next few years if they don't throw some effort into their server line (the software) and come up with a less expensive laptop.
2nd Rant:
Each new version of Mac Server makes fixing the Open Directory parts harder - in older versions you could search google to find the arcane chant to punch into the terminal to do magic. You could fix the underlying database, prune a user that isn't working well, and fix all sorts of corner cases.
Apple keeps removing these tools year after year.
Apple generally says that fixing the OpenDirectoy should amount to restoring from a backup - that would be fine if you found out about a problem right away, but if you've gone a month down the road it's annoying to potentially lose a months worth of work to fix a small problem. I haven't been bitten yet, but others have.
Whats the environment like for those network users? Are you only using 1 server? There's ways to load balance that. You're probably hitting throughput issues for sure.
On the second point: do you know whats missing from before? I'm pretty good with macOS server related terminal-foo. Might be able to help.
"Just wait, we'll release the software first, then laugh as they wail confused and cry, 'But where's the hardware? What ever will we do?'"
Try to relax. Posting on the Internet all day and night won't help you.
I am emotional and frustrated but not improving MacBooks, lame MacBook pro and iMacs not sure how this will help. Too late too little.
[1] - http://images.apple.com/xserve/pdf/L422277A_Xserve_Guide.pdf
The idiocy of how painful it is to manage a pool of ipads on a corporate network is the worse part. In particular because they can actually be locked down and secure and hence a perfect corporate device.