Prepare for changes to macOS Server 5.7.1
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The number of people hanging on to Macs as servers has to be vanishingly small, and Apple doesn't do small markets anymore. There are currently rumors of a "Pro" focused Mac Mini, yes, but that's going to be comparatively expensive and I doubt it could win back much server market even if Apple wanted to.
They'll stick around as servers for iOS builds because there's no other option (and the Pro Mini would be nice for that), but hanging on to Macs for any other sort of server outside of a home file server is a lost cause.
Minor nit: 2011 [0] But similar to you, I'm surprised macOS Server is even a thing anymore. What are you supposed to run it on? That six year old quad-core Mac Mini? The oh-so-long-in-the-tooth trash can Pro your department still clings to? Off the top of my head, I'm a little stumped as to what I'd use to best utilize Xcode's distributed build functionality. Apple hasn't made what I feel is an appropriate tool for that job in at least six years.
[0] https://images.apple.com/xserve/pdf/L422277A_Xserve_Guide.pd...
Failing that, what exactly constitutes Apple hardware, legally? Could I run a macOS VM on a big Dell server if I zip-tie a Mac Mini motherboard to the enclosure?
You can if, assuming Apple wished to pursue it, you're ready to tell that to a judge with a straight face.
That was followed by Xserve G5 from 2004 to 2006 and Intel Xserve from 2006 to 2011, with its last update in April 2009.
The storage-focused Xserve Raid was discontinued earlier in 2008.
The builds admittedly take a bit longer, but that's a small price to pay for style.
If it has hardware problems they probably need to scrap the entire thing and rebuild it from scratch.
I have no knowledge of their internal setup, but I suspect they have a big room full of racked ESX servers (non-Apple hardware) running builds on macOS VMs. And probably a ton of networked iPhone motherboards running automated tests.
I just wish they would make that kind of setup (macOS VMs on non-Apple hardware) legal for other developers.
Seriously....would love to be able to install MacOS as a VM on ESXi on a Dell Power Edge, or HP Proliant.
Yes, funny enough my employer likes to keep things on the up-and-up.
I was told that the entire final run of hardware was reserved for Apple internal use.
Our Jenkins CI/CD server was just a VM on the cluster, and ran Xcode to do the iOS and MacOS X builds on one set of slaves, and the Linux back-end server software on another slave.
Dunno what they’ve got now.
I get the sense that Apple's strict devotion to its product line is (to put it nicely) creating a discontinuity between their own practices and what they offer to others. It makes me think Apple needs a separate company or brand to offer practical utilities (and perhaps consulting) to companies wishing to deploy Apple software -- things like licenses to use macOS on non-Apple hardware (like a Dell EMC VxRack SDDC[0]), productizing some of their own IT solutions, special iPhones with a 1Gb RJ45 port attached for automated testing, and even "catch the vision"-style marketing to promote their idea of a data/compute center that integrates macOS and other Apple technologies.
[0] https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/converged-infrastructure/vxrac...
Departments themselves use adhoc apple hardware.
2) Even if they're backpedalling on the idea of macOS as a server and pushing for migrating to open source tools, they don't want to openly admit this, that always looks bad and unprofessional.
3) They're probably phasing it out slowly and in the next release or two they will probably deprecate it, and remove it completely from MAS in the next major macOS update.
4) They'll want to wait until they can play up their contribution and downplays that they were on the wrong side of history: "We're deprecating macOS Server, which has been a boon and a huge innovation in this space for 20 years, and helped $N millions of customers, but at this point the open source community has finally caught up to our quality."
5) At that point, the remaining useful features will be integrated into macOS proper for free, and they'll tout how they're benefiting everyone by doing this and simplifying everyone's workflow and saving everyone money.
I think it looks way worse to just let it limp along and slowly die. Fail fast, learn your lesson, and move on.
>1) It probably makes them at least a noticeable percentage of revenue, if not much, so that cutting it out completely would maybe cut funding for a dozen employees.
They are APPLE, they have ridiculous cash. If said employees are of a high quality/standard then I am sure they can figure out something else for them to do at Apple. Even if it means paying them for a few months while they get trained up on a new project/department.
The benefit of limping along and dying slowly is that it can be relatively quiet and uneventful, and at least the project dies with the appearance of dignity, even though it's actually the opposite. Investors applaud "sticking it out" even though the engineers knew it was dead for years. Review sites write poignant eulogies, instead of writing angry rants which they would do if it was cut short.
The thing about software (and probably most kinds of products) is that there's always someone who relies on it, no matter how dumb of an idea the product is, and usually that group is larger than you expect or seems reasonable. Those people are often the ones who yell the loudest when you inconvenience them, which is why Apple has to pander to them by torturing macOS Server to death instead of euthanizing it.
> They are APPLE, they have ridiculous cash.
They have always acted like a start-up that's strapped for cash. I've known many Apple employees and it's just been part of the culture, that if you work at Apple, you're going to wear many hats and they're going to utilize every second of yours to 200%. It was especially so this in the days of Jobs, and I doubt it's changed much in the past decade.
I am an investor (not in Apple, but other companies). Believe me, as an investor, there is nothing more that I want than for a company fail fast, and drop things quickly when they aren't working out. The worst thing for an investor is when a company tries to "stick it out" (investors read that as "wasting money").
I'm sure Apple are well aware of the lesson and are simply doing the right thing for the folks who did invest in macOS as a server. It is possible for a company to learn their lesson and do the best thing they can for their customer. Apple's financial position enables them to give a much longer runway than a typical startup changing direction.
The "right thing" at this point would be to help you clients move to something else (jumpcloud? AD, etc.) instead of continually putting out a diminished version of your product.
Edit: one thing to note: macOS Server is not an entire OS, but rather a Server.app application running on top of existing macOS installation that you can download from Mac App Store.
It's amazing when it works, but when it breaks you're SOL. Case in point is I inherited a semi-broken system when I started my job 3 years ago. ~40 enrolled laptops but couldn't add any more. Peeking into the logs the SQL server built into the .app bundle broke/corrupted.
Many others in the Apple forums had the same issue but no resolution and the solution ended up being "flatten and reinstall".
For a small business, sure Profile Manager might work, but scale beyond 10-20 users Jamf Pro is the way to go.
Probably because the big enterprise go for Microsoft and Active Directory, and the small ones go for nothing, just a "home" router, and iCloud/GApps/O365. Or you can spin up a Linux box and do most of this if you start getting bigger. The only place I can see this is large Mac heavy shops like designers etc. But even then, most of the MDM stuff can be hosted outside.
This is a case where I'd argue deviating from the "official" article title is warranted, as it more clearly explains the aim behind the submission, or to what specifically the submitter wishes to draw our attention.
A term cannot be accurate. I understand you're trying to suggest that "censorship" is an accurate way to describe this particular scenario, but that's your own subjective opinion, which IMO, is incorrect. Censorship necessarily implies an intentional effort to squelch a particular person or idea.
Is this bad? No. This is the whole positive and negative to active moderation.
"Changing a title" is not inherently an act of censorship because there are many reasons why a title could be changed. Changing a title might be censorship, but not always. In this case, it is NOT censorship because the title was modified based on a pre-established submission rule (i.e. from the HN guidelines "use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."), NOT due to any particular prejudice against the ideas expressed in the title.
It also seems a little strange to me that changing a title to reflect the author's actual title can somehow be construed as censorship. It seems to me that the person editorializing the title is more aptly described as a censor than the mechanism that restores the title to the original form and cadence intended by the author.
In this particular case there's a good argument GP makes against the supplied Apple headline as it's spin.
I would also argue that hiding "the aim behind the submission" is soft of the point, submissions should be able to stand on their own. If more context is required then a better link should be found IMO, a HN submission title is not the place for an opinion piece. Worst case scenario add a comment in your submission explaining your rationale.
I feel like that then runs afoul of HN's other guideline to prefer primary sources.
Consider the following scenario: PopularSoftware v.6.2 sneaks in a one-line mention in its changelog that the software will now proactively scan the contents of your computer. This would obviously be newsworthy and would make for a popular point of discussion for HN. How best should that be communicated in the submission? If we follow HN guidelines, the submission title should be copied from the main page, "PopularSoftware v.6.2 is released!" That doesn't really make it clear to the HN user casually scanning the front page that the submission is really trying to draw your attention to that particular, controversial bullet point.
An alternative would be promoting someone's blogpost or analysis of PopularSoftware 6.2 and its disclosure of hard-disk scanning. But as I mentioned earlier, you'd be promoting a secondary source over a primary source simply for the sake of clarity in the submission title.
I mean you've been here for quite a while judging by your profile, do you really find this to be a practical problem while browsing HN? Personally it's really a non-issue and the potential slippery slope of letting people come up with custom submission titles is not really worth it IMO.
Even if they don't, if the title is too boring they might let the story pass without doing either. A story titled simply "PopularSoftware v6.2.1 released" (it's even a x.y.1 release, which commonly means only small bug fixes) might not attract enough attention to get more than a few upvotes.
Not really. "macOS Server gets worse in 5.7.1" is a purely subjective opinion and there's no reason this personal opinion should override the actual article's title.
I personally have never used macOS server and from that context, the actual title ("Prepare for changes to macOS Server 5.7.1") makes a lot more sense.
That's different than the linked page but I think it gets across the changes that are coming.
As a once-proud and fond apple fanboy, i am biased here. I miss having compelling laptop and desktop options in the Mac space. In the same way that i am still using an '09 pro and a '12 air, i bet some IT folks still cling to their server infrastructure hoping that the glory days return. C'est la vie.
But more importantly, Apple has always been a personal computer company. Not an enterprise computer company. What’s more personal than a phone running a real computer operating system in your pocket? More people (ie the “personal”) buy iPhones + iPads in one year than Apple has sold traditional computers in the last decade. If not, the numbers should be close.
My company I worked at Part Time went all in. It was a disaster for 3 months. The IT department didn't make the decision but the Executive Board.
Just this summer, I now work at another company, and they went 100% Apple (Because students were issued iPads so why not switch everyone over of course). They ended up throwing away all their 1 to 3 year old Mac All in Ones, in all the computer labs, into the garbage (At Apple's Request Around 400 of them) and now students don't have access to a computer and only issued a tablet.
So adults have Mac Laptops and kids have iPads (K-12) seems so strange. I think that this is where Apple would love to put Enterprise with everyone without a special case just uses iPads.
Why? What issue did they run into?
In Portugal they were hardly seen anywhere beyond a couple of digital agencies and some departments of a couple of well funded universities.
And Interlog, a local re-seller with offices in Lisbon and Porto, was the only gate to Apple's kingdom.
I know that you're underscoring that the iPhone is their primary product. However, even though "phone" is in its name and was it's primarily replaced device, the iPhone to me has long since passed being a phone. Comparing time spent on device to the amount of minutes used as a phone, the "dialer" app is one of the least used apps on my phone. Essentially, it's a computer that fits in a pocket to the point we've been seeing designs to power a laptop by sliding a smartphone into a laptop style chassis (maybe not from Apple).
I don't think they're running a pile of mac pros. Do they run x86 rackmounts with a custom OS? Linux? Windows on azure?
Seems insane to spend the money to develop something like that, but not sell it.
They are 4-5x slower than the equivalent contemporary x86 boxes you can run Linux/Windows on. As a modern day server they are fairly rubbish really.
Curious if you install SSD disks in RAID? Then it might actually be a pretty decent home server.
[1] - https://www.ebay.com/itm/Eight-Core-Apple-Xserve-Server-3-0G...
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/xserve-processor-upgrad...
I've been tempted, too. Mostly for the nostalgia kick.
I've seen them on fleaBay at really reasonable prices. It looks like .edu, .gov, and .orgs are phasing them out and often a listing shows a stack of 20 or 50 of them, and you can pick the one you want.
The GUI is supposed to make it easy to get this kind of stuff set up without really understanding what it does. But, something strange always went wrong which required trying to understand what the hell the open source software was doing at the same time as trying to understand where in the configuration file hierarchy the apple GUI was inserting its config and what this was doing.
Having tinkered a bit with various services on Linux since, its much easier to cut out the middle man, install from scratch and configure a vanilla installation using the config files. All the helpful comments on the options in the config files make it much easier to understand what's happening anyway.
And lots of stuck-on features that I couldn't imagine anyone using in a small office, like a barebones custom Wiki.
I never understood where Apple were going with it. As I understand it, it was a solid product that did what it was supposed to - i.e. help network admins manage a network full of Macs and i-devices.
Then those features disappeared, and it turned into My Little Server, but worse.
Which is a shame, because there may be a market for a good server product, and Apple could have owned it.
> Service: Mail Server
> Status: Removed in Server 5.7.1
> Alternatives: dovecot/Postfix, Courier, KerioConnect
Not that having a minimal GUI isn't nice for users with minimal technical skills, provided that you keep up with current versions.
However, the Server "version" of OSX has long been nothing more than an application that installs a version of several open sourced server daemons along with a enough of a GUI to configure the basics.
* Centralized password management
* Preload software (chrome, firefox, java) and settings
* Enterprise CA
* Schedule OS updates
* https://meraki.cisco.com/solutions/mobile-device-management
I've used these two before and they work quite well.
As to pre-installed software, not sure. I always just installed brew, and did what I needed myself. CA was already on the box and scheduled OS updates were, lets just say very rare. (don't do it yourself, it can break the authentication software integration).
Not using Macs, it would seem.
Pretty much every other option looks better.
You then add a couple of more components to get some more enterprise features: Munki for software distribution (free and open source), Chef or Puppet for configuration management (both free and open source) and osquery for monitoring and visibility (free and open source).
Disclosure: Jumpcloud employee. My email is in my profile if you want to get in touch.
Is there an iOS MDM provider which will allow you to configure per-app VPNs that connect to an open-source VPN? Microsoft Intune only supports specific corporate VPNs, is that because per-app VPNs require a corporate VPN app that is installed on the phone? Why can't the native IPSEC client perform this function on a per-app basis? It would allow segmentation of Facebook from normal traffic.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/intune/vpn-setting-configur...
Edit: Profile Manager is still supported in 5.7.1
Instructions for MacOS Server setup of Profile Manager without DEP, https://medium.com/@JoshuaAJung/managing-your-mobile-devices...
This makes it sound to me like we should acquiesce with "cloud" services, but that seems like a very different perspective than their recent privacy note:
> We design our products to limit the collection and use of data, use on-device processing whenever possible, and provide transparency and control over how information is shared.
I never ran Mac Server (at least, not for anything real) but it was always a selling point to me that I could easily run these services myself if I wanted. Including more features in vanilla macOS is great, while dropping other significant features sours the whole platform for me a tiny bit. People (and companies) always want extra power, just in case, even if 99% of them never use it.
>This makes it sound to me like we should acquiesce with "cloud" services, but that seems like a very different perspective than their recent privacy note
Apple is all about the cloud these days. Their privacy efforts are about keeping your data safe, be it in the (their) cloud or on your device.
Sadly trust is not a renewable resource, and i lost mine years ago in cloud providers ability to keep data safe.
I'd love some confirmation of this but I have a sense macOS server is used primarily in file heavy scenarios like movie and music production.
The current iteration, however, needs some work. On my old Mac Mini, it is constantly complaining that it needs more space. This will become annoying and I'm sure that some people will find this message anxiety-inducing. For me, I have been meaning to find out whether it stops working or if it purges old content when this happens. I hope it is the latter!
edit: File sharing was on Server.app, now it's just plain macOS-flavored SMB
[0] https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_fruit....
So I guess High Sierra and Mojave? Though I don't see the Time Machine Server feature on 10.14.0 at System Preferences > Sharing.
I'm using a Time Machine server on Linux (Netatalk), but I suffer from an infinite loop somehow. It never finishes the upload for some reason, and keeps incrementing the amount of MB backed up and still needed to back up.
Granted, the same can be said about a lot of Apple product possibilities, including desktop Macs period. And there are always tradeoffs: Apple's startup-type organizational structure makes multi-tasking hard, but also makes for fantastic focused products. If they were more traditionally structured they probably would have maintained the Mac a lot better, but would the iPhone have come to be in the same way?
At any rate it leaves a small hole for me at least, I don't mind handling things normally at work but I enjoyed playing with a nice GUI at home, and some small business I know still use Server. I asked for some suggestions on the Ars forums, and for anyone else wondering, one I was given that now looks really promising after first tests is Synology's DiskStation Manager, run standalone if you buy their equipment but also possibly under ESXi vis Xpenology (alongside macOS if that's still desirable for some of the remaining MDM functionality and such). I haven't dug deep into it yet but the GUI and power looks pretty nice, and ESXi will even run on Mac Pros in which case a macOS guest shouldn't even be a license violation. Something to consider anyway as a replacement. For simple network needs those running UniFi kit might find the controller is also enough, though right now it's a little shallow on some core features. Might still be good enough and again a decent GUI.
Anyone on HN have any other ideas for equivalents, with sane GUI defaults even if some CLI usage is needed as well? Are some free general distros these days fine for that, or have popular GUI managers that can go on top? I could see more specific distributions like FreeNAS being good for some applications depending on what exactly Server was being used for. Another storage focused option might be NexentaStor CE, though that is limited to 10TB.
And that’s supposed to be a good thing, because… you get to install and test the latest stuff yourself. Because Apple can’t and won’t. OK.
Anyone has experience with that? Can I trust it?
I've been using it with netatalk for a while, recently migrated it to a 2012 MacPro running 10.14. Seems to work about as well as it did on my linux box.
(Unfortunately I no longer remember the exact problems, but they were not nearly bad enough to deter me from continuing to use it. I have about half a dozen Mac devices in my home, so the net positive of continuous wireless Time Machine backups has far outweighed said small issues.)
For iOS development? Everyone uses Macs.
https://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=gs.apple.com#la...
Just says OS is 'unknown', Apache server. So they may possibly be using a version of Mac OS to host at least something.
This one is just showing up as Apple, definitely used to be Darwin but has also been Linux before.
Yes, serious XMPP servers there <3
(Your mileage may vary as usual.)
The 255 bytes limit seems common (xfs, zfs)-while reiser allows 4kb or so.
What kind of naming scheme do you have that you had a problem? Long, multibyte file names?
Bash cd wouldn't let mee leap all the way down in one go - but if I got down there (while ls a * ;do cd a * ;done) - I could create a file (ed: view from "top"):
find -iname ok|wc
1 1 12805
For other's reference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_systems#Lim...