Niteshooter

Had a funny feeling that was the answer, thanks for saving me a lot more grief!

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Theseus

Tell me about it...I've been asked to write a couple chapters of the official Apple Authorized Training Series workbook for use in the LION201 (Server) training courses, and it's an awful pain trying to come up with exercises which all basically tell the student to "Slide the switch to On - the service is now configured."

The server engineers I've been in contact with have told me that if a feature isn't in Server.app, configure it in the command line. Server Admin is quickly becoming deprecated.

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Apple Certified Trainer (Mountain Lion 101/201), ACTC 10.8, ACSP 10.8, ACSA 10.6, ACMT

Chealion

From my gander, it's just as good (if not better because of push notifications) as Snow Leopard. In terms of doing the actual hosting bit.

As for configuration? Well that's your 99 steps backwards. Instead of a somewhat usable GUI to at least get you to a starting point it's entirely by hand now making the reasons to use Mac OS X over installing Linux or Snow Leopard Server very few.

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I still remember Macnutt.

mguertin

Indeed. Apache/PHP/MySQL stuff has never been great on OSX server to start with and Lion did not help things. If iCalDAV and AFP weren't such a pain in Linux (not to mention time machine backups over the network not being supported, etc) I'd go fully back to Linux in a second for my needs.

Chealion

I haven't had a chance to investigate that closely but with CalendarServer and AddressBookServer both moving to using Postgre as their storage backend - wouldn't that make setting it up on Linux easier? The whole setting up an OD wannabe kludge with CalendarServer 1.0 put me off ever trying to set it up.

Another thing on my list is to see how hard it would be to roll your own APNS (Push Notifications) integration with Dovecot on Linux...

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I still remember Macnutt.

mguertin

The painful part about the setup was all the fiddly configuration, not so much the backend of things. I haven't tried things lately, I want to find the time to do so as well though. I'm not sure if the db backend as opposed to the flat file setup is going to make that much of a difference.

I'm not sure about Push stuff on linux at all either. I just stared for a couple minutes at the one really nice Linux server I built that's sitting in my rack here at home and collecting dust. It was originally running iSCSI based storage but I've since moved my storage solution to hardware RAID on my OSX Server box and the Linux machine hasn't even been booted in about a year ... I should get cracking on that one!

bgps

I have Lion Server installed and it works great. Right now running on a MacMini, no issues at all. I'm looking at it on a large scale for work. Looking at MacPro Server and Promise VTrack attached RAID. This is mainly going to be used a File Server where large files are going to be archived. Haven't made final decision as of yet but I am leaning that way.

BGPS

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BGPS


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MacBook Pro 15" 2010
MacBook Air 13" 2012
MacMini 2011
iPad2 32 WiFi+3G
iPhone 4s
AppleTV2, 3

mguertin

Well I got to spend some quality time with Lion server yesterday and all I have to say is wow ... it's got some serious issues going on. Anyone considering deploying this on a large scale I would recommend to wait a while at the very least.

The web interface for the profile management is horrible (and doesn't even render properly in latest Safari!!?!). There are items far down the left hand list that I could not even get to. Push doesn't properly work (at least at first try) for the profiles, and in fact I also had issues even downloading and manually loading a profile on a test machine -- so not sure if it's the push or the actual profile stuff to blame. Some things took, some didn't. Open Directory/network authentication is painfully slow (and yes everything resolves properly both ways). Any changes to configurations result in 2-3 minutes of the "profile manager" updating after you've made the changes, during which time the server was not very responsive (a late 2010 mac mini w/ 4G ram) and nothing else running on it at all. Showed lots of free ram, but it showed the CPU cores massively pegged the whole time.

I am very very disappointed with the direction they have taken things with Lion server. Don't know who they had on the teams that made the decisions on this one but I hope they don't stick around too long :/

I honestly can't recommend this to any clients who need more than absolute basics (file sharing seems to work ok for AFP users anyway). I found serious issues (read: data loss) with iCal and Addressbook components within first 15 minutes of usage. iCal also lost delegation info 3 times in a row on one calendar. Not sure I even fully understand how this new delegation is supposed to work ... when you make new "calendars" they look more like groups (with calendars embedded within them). Group calendars seem to be missing in action as well. Maybe I just need to spend more time with the documentation ...

Time to brush up on my Linux skills again methinks. This new server releases feels very "beta" ... maybe even approaching "alpha" quality.

mguertin

Here's an example for you all -- the web interface says calendar service is off ... the server app says it's on (and it is indeed on and working with iCal clients).

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	Screen Shot 2011-09-06 at 5.02.44 PM.png (105.1 KB, 67 views)
	Screen Shot 2011-09-06 at 5.02.33 PM.png (18.5 KB, 3 views)

mguertin

And some more fun ... apparently I have a user called "Loading..." AND it lets me edit this user and supposedly the "push" to it works as well (other user names blanked out in the screen shot to protect the innocent hehe).

I take it back on my beta comments, we're definitely dealing with "alpha" material here ...

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	Screen Shot 2011-09-06 at 5.08.02 PM.jpg (39.6 KB, 3 views)
	Screen Shot 2011-09-06 at 5.09.56 PM.png (90.9 KB, 3 views)