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Comment by mitjak | Hacker News Reader

> Caching Server, File Sharing Server, and Time Machine Server

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.

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These services are not removed, but moved to the main OS -> "Services Migrated from macOS Server to macOS High Sierra".

Sorry, I didn't claim they were removed, I was curious why these were moved to High Sierra.

It's a lot easier to manage now. If you just need those features, you no longer need to install macOS server. Just toggle a switch in the Sharing preferences.

As far as content caching goes, making it built in to the operation system is a win-win situation. It lessens load on Apple data centers and speeds up downloads/reduces bandwidth for customers with multiple Apple devices.

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!

Our SMB design office is media-heavy, with lots of very large raw photo shoots and source video files. We've been using Apple Server for file sharing for a long time (running on Mac minis). All other services have been migrated or abandoned. At some point we need to switch to a Windows or Linux SMB server, cloud storage is still cost-prohibitive with the file sizes we're throwing around.

edit: File sharing was on Server.app, now it's just plain macOS-flavored SMB

Consider a synology NAS. They are made for a use case like that.

Been really happy with mine... still running a DS-409+ with 4x 4TB drives. Will probably upgrade or homebrew a freenas box again. Still sour from my last freenas experience in 2012 though.

I'd go for Samba on linux over Windows for Macs, as they have vfs_fruit [0] which includes the apple smb extensions for performance.

[0] https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_fruit....

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