[geeks] Sun Fire V120 Server -vs- Apple Xserve

[alex j avriette]

>> the reason it is not useful as a server platform is its extreme
>> lack of any remote control abilities.
>
> What are you talking about?  It's effectively a unix box at the command 
> line!

its effectively a unix box, sure.

> (well there's netinfo, which is new, but it's just a direct follow-on to
> NIS, done by the very same designer, and finally much better it 
> seems....)

netinfo is a horrible and ugly hack which turns my stomach. its 
obfuscated and undocumented interface, as well as the shoddy manpages 
associated with it and poor stability are a curse on the entire 
operating system.

> Hmmm.... that's about an opposite problem -- using the GUI gets
> extraneous stuff created for things like the anon-FTP user.....

its a mac. its got a gui. in fact that its primary interface. to say 
that it is extraneous or should not be used is akin to saying that one 
should remove /usr/bin from their path and just use /bin instead. it is 
poor implementation of poor planning. its an utter wreck.

> Netinfo has commands for adding users at the command-line.....

netinfo can blow me. it makes my machines useless.

> I don't know what documentation you've been reading, but whatever it is
> has mislead you.  Everything we've needed to do has been trivial at the
> command-line from SSH.  I've never used any GUI for doing sys-admin
> stuff on OS X.

i want to add a user, 'cormac' to my osx server. demonstrate how that is 
done.
i want to add new hosts on my network:

billybob.posixnap.net has address 10.1.1.199
jihad.posixnap.net has address 10.1.1.8
luke.posixnap.net has address 10.1.1.7
scrod.posixnap.net has address 10.1.1.6

so that they resolve without nameserver lookups. one would think 
/etc/hosts would be the place for this.

i want to change my nameserver.

here are the ones that will warp your noodle:

i want to turn on "universal access" so the cursor can be controlled 
with the keyboard. here's the catch. i dont have a mouse.
i want to add a new piece of software from apple (say i want to upgrade 
to 10.1.5).

greg, you are blowing smoke up my ass if you tell me any of these are 
accomplished in any sort of intuitive fashion from the commandline.

> and it would be hillarious considering what we are doing is happily
> serving many gigabytes of web stuff out per day.....  :-)

nobody said you had to be competent or use unix or even a useful 
enterprise worthy os to serve gigabytes of content a day.

> Yup, that could be a real problem -- we just haven't tripped too hard
> over it yet....

and yet youre using it so much youre serving gigs of content a day. 
sounds like you guys know those "enterprise" mac servers inside and out.

>> i dislike that they have not produced a "security
>> update" for the OS based on the apache DOS hole recently spotted (and 
>> in
>> fact remote www exploit in some OS's).
>
> Oh, come on now!  It's only been a few days....  :-)

there are already remote exploits for it. that is long enough.

alex