Server Admin still does most of the work of managing the MacOS server system and its services.Īpple attempts to achieve scale for its apps via something called "Grand Central Dispatch" (GCD). We wonder why it's still around, save that it's a safe choice for small, civilian-run networks. In Snow Leopard, simple basic administrative choices can be performed in Server Preferences, but aren't likely to be used by very many administrators. Apple's Server Preferences administrative application in Leopard was available only if Advanced wasn't chosen we've not used them subsequently because Server Preference choices had no depth and were superficial. Nonetheless, Apple's Snow Leopard performed faster than its predecessor, Leopard 10.5.8, in our testing, due to some of these operating systems enhancements.Īdministration is somewhat improved with Snow Leopard. This means there are no blade variations, no 4U/16-core muscle machines, like HP's DL580/585 G5 servers. Like all Apple operating systems, Snow Leopard is captive to Apple's hardware, which is currently limited to 1U-sized Apple Xservers (and hefty MacPro desktops). With the dumping of PowerPC server support code, Apple has made several fundamental changes to MacOS in terms of memory management models and in capacity performance for applications.
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In a sense this is a plus, because once installed onto newer Intel-based Apple hardware, the Snow Leopard OS footprint actually shrinks by several gigabytes, since PowerPC code is deleted. It's important to note that Snow Leopard does not run on older Apple servers running G4/G5 (IBM PowerPC) processors. Snow Leopard, by contrast, takes Podcast Producer 2 with updated Xgrid2 and installs a workable version that's capable of distributed podcast encoding in about five minutes, doing all of the homework and connectivity bits itself, painlessly.Ī similar example of better "fit and finish" is Podcast Composer, which allows easy creation of Podcast Producer2 workflows, compared with the MacOS 10.5 version's way of creating workflows by hand. On Leopard, it took us nearly a day to work through and troubleshoot all of the elements of the distributed processing of Podcast Producer and Xgrid.
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In MacOS 10.5, Xgrid is difficult to make workable on distributed Mac (server or client) hardware unless one has advanced integration skills - and is willing to troubleshoot error logs until the application works. Xgrid processes workflows (often things such as media encoding) either on the host server or on other Apple MacOS machines. Podcast Producer 2 is an updated server app that benefits from Apple's Xgrid compute clustering application. Nonetheless, it's the first time any of the operating system vendors have paid much attention to fleet mobile/cell provisioning, aside from RIM's primitive BlackBerry message servers. As we don't use iPhones, we were unable to test the Mobile Access Server's iPhone accessibility and the applications sadly don't work with other mobile operating systems, although third parties may be able to offer this for other phones in the future. Similarly, another new app, the iPhone Configuration utility, can provision and synchronize a fleet of iPhones. Advanced connections can be completed through Apple's L2TP/IPSec-based (or old-fashioned PPTP) VPN connectivity.
A "VPN-less" authenticated/encrypted entry method that's designed to sync iPhones, Mac clients, to their address books, mail, and other internal resources. Users can merge their contacts into the server easily enough - if they're Snow Leopard users.Īpple adds a new service to Snow Leopard, the Mobile Access server. The Address Book server isn't backwards compatible with Leopard, because the protocol it's based on, CardDAV, didn't exist when Leopard was developed.
It stores vCards outside of the directory service. Address Book is compatible with Zimbra open source e-mail, and is modeled after WebDAV, as an XML-based extension of the venerable vCard. It joins with directory services (Apple's Open Directory, and Microsoft's Active Directory via open source Samba) rather than be an extension of Open Directory. The Address Book server app, which allows multiple computers to share contacts, is new.