I've set it up for about a dozen clients so far and none of them are having any serious issues, but they are all using the basics, afp, addressbook, ical, vpn, etc. The profile manager is still pretty messed up, but luckily no clients have needed to use profiles yet. So yes, for straightforward needs I think it's ok too.
Hmmm sounds like Lion server still isn't for me. SL server is running ok the only headache I am running into is figuring out to get one friend to access only his website and not everyone elses. I'm sure it's just me and a mixed up permission but it's starting to drive me crazy.
after a few days of use i am finding a few obnoxious quirks, mainly to do with the finder. 2.66 QC mac pro with 12GB of RAM should not be hanging and beachballing as much as this is when moving around through files. also finding some finder windows just pop up blank for a few secs, then populate after 5-10 seconds. i cannot frigging get over how much more efficient the memory use is on this than 10.5 server though.
Well I take back my assessment that it's ok for basic usage ... two different clients today having serious ACL inheritance issues. One worked fine for several weeks and the other worked fine for a week. They both stopped working over the weekend. Basically any new files/folders that are being made are not inheriting permissions and are being set so that only the user who created them has read/write access, everyone else is read only. No sign of ACL's at all on the new items (only POSIX permissions).
The only workaround I've found so far (this was even Apple support's suggestion) was to NOT use AFP file sharing and to only use SMB file sharing -- which completely ignores ACL's from what I understand and just uses POSIX inheritance. Just when I thought they were starting to get their act together ... it seems that they aren't. Seems like AFP sharing is quite broken, at least in this release.
I'm honestly at the point where I think Apple just really doesn't care about their server product any longer. Their support person was literally just searching the KB and telling me what the articles he found said -- like I hadn't done that already.
I found a workaround (that doesn't involve having to disable AFP sharing). It seems to have worked for both clients if I manually removed all the ACL's and then restore and re-propagated them -- but this only works if they are propagated from the hardware area in the "Storage" tab. We'll see how long things hold up.
Apple is moving in the same direction with all of their formerly professional products ... cripple them, candy wrap them and make them suitable only for the average home user. Lion server has some pretty serious issues that they haven't addressed yet ... Apple has done this with the last several releases of the Server OS -- which you can't even call a server OS now, it's basically a band-aid they tack on the side of the client OS now ... they add new and "cool" things to it that they never actually finish debugging and get resolved.
The latest pain I've had to deal with are lost ACL's -- one filesystem "lost" it's ACL's twice in a two week period and totally screwed up the permissions on tons of things. Apple's solution was to run a filesystem repair and then manually re-add all the ACL's. That's not a solution, that's another band-aid fix. If you have some straight forward ACL's sure, I guess it's tolerable. When you have fine-grained ACL's for many many folders it's painful.
And let's not even talk about profiles.
Apple is turning into an iOS factory that's catered towards mom and pop users and everything else be damned. I wouldn't be surprised if this was one of the last (if not the last) release of their "Server" software product (not to mention server capable hardware).
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