Home › Forums › OS X Server and Client Discussion › Questions and Answers › Lion Server
[url]http://www.apple.com/macosx/lion/[/url]
Right near the bottom of the page:
“Lion Server is now part of Mac OS X Lion. Itβs easy to set up your Mac as a server and take advantage of the many services Lion Server has to offer.”
So no more separate OS X Server and all Macs are Lion Servers. Another nail in the coffin or a smart move?
I’m glad that they did continue to release servers at all, although I was kinda hoping they would license the server to run under some different VM hypervisor/hardware.
Having a combined server/client version of the operating system is really not that strange if you think about your average out of the box linux distribution.
It kinda makes sense given that so much of the operating system is common to both the server and client versions. It would reduce a lot of development time on their end. The worst part of it though, is that I’m a bit startled by the possibility of all workstation users to configure their own servers or AirDrops (if they had wifi on).
In that sense, I really hope that the new management tools will give us more control over configuration of the other machines. I’m a bit cynical given that for the past couple of releases, the server version of the operating system boasts a shiny interface, but then you find gaping holes of functionality which invalidate having the interface in the first place (see dns management). In a similar vein, MCX seems to control some aspects of the OS and then inexplicably leave out pretty obvious targets (like sidebar mcx, which is really quite limited for something so central to the operating system).
The profile based management looks reminiscent of the iphone configuration utility and is probably some extension of that idea. Although I can only speculate on how that works π (im not a registered developer), I’d gamble to say that the xml output of that would be stored in a directory record and then applied via a client process similar to ManagedClient.app, and some equivalent application on the other platforms.
Anyway, it looks like they will keep server alive.. but most of the things they are pushing are driven by their consumer products moreso than needs of the enterprise.
I guess they’re a phone company now, and I’d be wrong to think different π