Alternative to Leopard Server

[IINDIE]

Well it has been a few months already and unfortunately we have faced more than a few issues with mac os x Server 10.5.x so far , either services don’t work the way they have been in 10.4 upgrades dont come up properly and end up in Kernel Panics , WebDav authentification does not work up normally , Os X Server ‘s documentation gives either too few directions or way too many when trying to troubleshoot services . All that would be well and good if we did not have productions systems to setup but unfortunately we do have a whole slew of MacPro s to install and since Mac os X server 10.5.x falls very short of objectives we have come to consider alternatives to our Server of choice.

Any suggestion made here as to which product be it Linux based or not will be studied and considered in a detailed manner , before posting please consider we have called Apple Support on a regular basis about the issues we have been facing and either had uninformed vague answers , we can’t base a whole setup on these uncertainties , and we need to go forward with our projects.

I will come back to os X Server as soon as things get a bit better on this front and will be glad to come back to it , but since our feedback has either been ignored by Apple on the matter we cannot keep on waiting to deploy servers all the more since 10.4.x is not distributed any longer by Apple Europe.

I understand this looks out of topic on a board that is dedicated to Mac os X Server but the matter has come to a head nowadays it is either jump on another platform or die by lack of functionality and change hardware platform altogether… Macs are good hardware and i would like to keep on using them for the foreseeable future, Mac os X client is an excellent system software , Mac os X server 10.4 has achieved great things until now thanks to the community around it but Apple seems to have dropped the ball with 10.5 Server.

I await to read your posts and replies on this matter and i apologize for the disturbance but unfortunately we are facing issues that go beyond mere testing…Thanking you for your time and attention and waiting to read from you soon ,

Best Regards,
IINDIE.

[khiltd]

That was extremely difficult to read and I’m still not sure what it is you’re asking for. You’re obviously aware of the existence of other operating systems so I have a hard time believing that anyone could possibly name a practical alternative you’ve never heard of before. What is it you’re expecting people to say in response to this?

[deemery]

Well, if your server machine is PowerPC, pretty much your only alternative is YellowDog Linux (which ain’t cheap).

If you’re running on an Intel machine, you can use BootCamp and load pretty much any flavor of Linux. Probably the best choice for server is CentOS, which is a clone of RedHat.

But before I took that plunge, I’d suggest making very sure you don’t have hardware problems. Something like a bad memory chip (been there 😥 ) can cause a lot of nasty unpredictable behaviors, no matter what OS you’re running.

dave

[luke]

We need more details. What do you need this server to do? If you want an exact clone on Mac OS X Server, you could (almost) do it with linux or bsd. The things you wouldn’t get are AFP server, Xgrid, WebObjects, Quicktime Streaming, and the GUI utils. Having said that, it will be no easy task to replicate anything but a small portion of the functionality.

Open Directory would be pretty tough to replicate, but if you install Kerberos 5, OpenLDAP, and use the schema extensions from OS X Server, you would be most of the way there. Keep in mind though that you will have to do everything manually using kadmin and an LDAP editor. Apache has a fantastic LDAP client that runs on the Mac which you can use for creating users, groups, automounts. MCX settings will be possible but difficult. They are plists encoded in base64 (I think) in LDAP.

Cyrus, Postfix, Jabber, Bind, NFS, Samba, etc… These are all open source and can be compiled on Linux. For the most part they will work in exactly the same way. You will have to manually get them working by configuring through the config files, and may have to do some work to get them all authenticating with Kerberos and authorizing through LDAP.

Good luck! Consider writing an article if you go down this route.

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