OS X Server | Hacker News Reader

OS X Server

apple.com

25 pointskfinley12 comments

It's an interesting approach to make the server utilities an add-on to the base OS X platform rather than a separate operating system as with Windows.

Interesting features are "profile manager", which sounds like an LDAP server and the Mail/Calendar server to replicate Exchange functionality.

Yet it's very much what SuSE has been doing with YaST modules for years. Need an NTP server? click. Want to play around with NIS? click. Kerberos? Click.

Indeed, and Red Hat may have taken it a step farther (I'm not familiar enough with SuSe to know whether it's actually different) by providing different entitlements, which are really just repo subscriptions. Want access to the advanced server stuff, not the standard workstation utils, purchase that entitlement and you'll have new packages available to you. Install, use their configuration utilities, etc.

I'm presuming you already know, but for the benefit of Mr Random Reader: it's been that way for a while now (as of OS X 10.7 Lion).

I imagine you already know about this if you qualify, but Mac and iOS developers just got a free redemption code to get OS X server.

Woah. This seems highly relevant to me. I might actually be able to manage all the macs, ipads, and iphones running around my house in a more centralized way? It seems worth 20 bucks just to find out.

Can it help manage my current home media server, a headless 2003 Dell running SuSE?

I just wish I had a way to run my XCode builds in a VM locally (i.e. not paying a remote entity for the privilege) .. does anyone know if OS X Server can be run in Parallels or VMWare or some such thing?

OS X (since Lion) includes a license to run a virtual copy (well, 2 I think). I can't say that I've run the Server app component in a VM but I don't know of any reason why it wouldn't work, it's essentially just an app that runs under OS X in the first place.

The most interesting feature for me is the XCode Server + Bots.

I'm still trying to figure out how to use it. I've installed it, added a git-repo, created a Bot, but it does nothing. Also, I don't know how to tell it to do "pod install"[1] before attempting to build the app.

1. http://docs.cocoapods.org/guides/installing_cocoapods.html

I just want to see Bots work and what is has to offer that my already existing Jenkins CI environment doesn't.

If you haven't seen it already, you might find the WWDC 13 session video 'Continuous Integration with Xcode' useful, it covers bots.

https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/videos/

This is the most interesting feature for me as well. Intuitively, there has to be some sort of pre build script just like in XCode.

Unfortunately—unless I missed a change in the release notes since Bots was introduced at WWDC—there isn't built in support for something like `pod install`, though there's probably a hack someone's figured out. See Michele Titolo's open radar here http://openradar.appspot.com/14221477

Jenkins is going to have alot more functionality, especially with 3rd party integrations and doing arbitrary work. Jenkins is also an ugly mess than can be painful to setup, especially since most iOS/Mac developers build from Xcode and not the command line. OS X Server gets some ease of use out of only doing running standard Tests, static analysis, and building your project for distribution (they bragged about 1-click downloads from their Bots website to people in your company, but I haven't tried that). Bots integrates with Xcode to give you a nice rundown of how tests ran on multiple devices and OSes.

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