I help to manage a network of Macs at a local community centre - about
twenty iMacs (wireless networked) and one Mac Pro, currently all
running 10.5. There’s about £1,000 available and I was thinking of
getting OS X Server to simplify user management. With the limited
budget there are two options - a Mac Mini Server or installing OS X
Server on the Mac Pro. I’m concerned that a Mac Mini wouldn’t be up to
the job whereas the Mac Pro is mostly used with Logic Studio as part
of a small recording studio. Would there be any problems running Logic
on OS X Server? Any thoughts on the viability of either option?
Would there be any problems running Logic
on OS X Server?
I wouldn’t, but that’s not to say you couldn’t. Logic, or any audio DAW for that matter, uses a lot of system resources. Asking one machine to do that and host a network server is a bit much in my opinion.
The mini that is sold pre-configured as server is really a good deal, but you have to ask yourself what is the server to be used for? File sharing? Internet Sharing? Apple Remote client settings?
Generally speaking Mac servers are not used for hosting applications like Windows servers are so there is not as much stress placed on the hardware. File serving, print serving and client startup settings should be able to be handled by the mini server no problem. Internet sharing probably not a good idea.
There is a limit to how much file serving you can do with the internal mini drive however. Using an external FW 800 drive housing to add additional file storage would work fine for medium loads. Heavy loads, such as with a DAW or video editing, might struggle a bit with the FW 800 depending on if that is where you are accessing audio/video files from/to live.
On 17 March 2010 00:30, chuckamuck email@hidden wrote:
On 16 Mar 2010, 8:22 pm, rogerhoughton wrote:
Would there be any problems running Logic
on OS X Server?
I wouldn’t, but that’s not to say you couldn’t. Logic, or any audio DAW for that matter, uses a lot of system resources. Asking one machine to do that and host a network server is a bit much in my opinion.
The mini that is sold pre-configured as server is really a good deal, but you have to ask yourself what is the server to be used for? File sharing? Internet Sharing? Apple Remote client settings?
Generally speaking Mac servers are not used for hosting applications like Windows servers are so there is not as much stress placed on the hardware. File serving, print serving and client startup settings should be able to be handled by the mini server no problem. Internet sharing probably not a good idea.
There is a limit to how much file serving you can do with the internal mini drive however. Using an external FW 800 drive housing to add additional file storage would work fine for medium loads. Heavy loads, such as with a DAW or video editing, might struggle a bit with the FW 800 depending on if that is where you are accessing audio/video files from/to live.
There won’t be individual user accounts on any of the Macs. It’s
mainly that I want to simplify setting up and maintaining multiple
Macs with the same assortment of user groups, each with their own
application and Internet preferences, e.g. one group that has a
limited selection of applications, certain websites (mainly social
networking) blocked and some common file sharing within that group.
There’ll be no print serving or significant personal back-up of data.
(On reflection I probably asked the wrong question to start with, and
don’t really know enough about OS X Server to know if it’s the right
solution.)
I have to take a little issue with this, only because I’ve got two of
these things in my basement, and have been running Mac servers since
1996 or so. Mac OS X Server is a full-bore Unix server. It runs the
entire free software stack, which means it can run the usual AMP
(Apache/MySQL/PHP) stuff, and it also runs Apple’s amazing Java
server, WebObjects (what the Apple Store runs on). Leopard Server
ships with Ruby on Rails installed and ready to out-Web 2.0 the
competition. So to say that Mac servers don’t host applications misses
the point quite a bit.
I agree entirely that you don’t want to run an interactive (desktop)
application on a server. I would say the same about any server, unless
it was so over-specced for the jobs it was being asked to do that it
just didn’t matter. Mac OS X Server’s kernel (the tiny part of the OS
that talks directly to the hardware) is optimized for running the
server processes, and gives much more of the processor’s attention to
them to the detriment of anything that might be interacting on the
display or with the keyboard.
The mini Server is a great deal price-wise, and from what I’ve read,
it’s actually quite a snappy server in its own right. Stuff it full of
all the RAM it will hold (true for any server, really) and it sits up
and barks like a big dog.
Finally, Web service (static pages) is one of the least stressful
things a server can be asked to do. I used to run Net BSD on an SE/30,
and it could saturate a T1 with answered file requests. The network is
your gating factor, not the processor or even the disk system. A fancy
interactive site with databases and application servers will certainly
require more than a 30 MHz 68030 processor and a 20 MB hard disk,
though.
Walter
On Mar 16, 2010, at 8:30 PM, chuckamuck wrote:
Generally speaking Mac servers are not used for hosting applications
like Windows servers are so there is not as much stress placed on
the hardware. File serving, print serving and client startup
settings should be able to be handled by the mini server no problem.
Internet sharing probably not a good idea.
Incidentally, the Mac Mini Server isn’t such a good deal at education
prices as OS X Server is available separately at a substantial
discount - roughly half-price - against a saving of only about 10% on
the server bundle.
Oh, okay. In that case, those are the sorts of services which would be
just about the /only/ thing running on that server, and the server
would be tuned to give priority to those applications. If you used
either of those on a server that was also doing general workgroup
server duties, or Internet services, you’d probably have a fairly
miserable experience at everything.
It’s funny that those ideas originated at NeXT, Steve Jobs’ other
company. That was one of the crown jewels of NeXTSTEP – that the
interface of an application could be “torn off” and run on a
completely different machine on the network, so that you could, say,
run Photoshop on a beast-like server and control its interface from a
much smaller desktop somewhere else on the net, with only the control
instructions from the interface and the screen proxy of the image you
were working on traveling back and forth – the bulk of the data would
stay on the server and never go anywhere.
Walter
On Mar 17, 2010, at 3:15 PM, chuckamuck wrote:
On 17 Mar 2010, 7:10 pm, waltd wrote:
Tell me more about this. I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Do
you mean a Citrix server setup or Windows Terminal Services?
There’s a half-step between full NetBoot and stand-alone machines that
you should look at. Workgroup Manager lets you set up user accounts
without the need to store the entire user environment on the server.
The login is negotiated with the server, but then the user data is
still on the client computer so you don’t have the huge resource drain
of a full NetBoot experience. There’s a way for laptop users to check
out their account and go on the road, too.
Walter
On Mar 17, 2010, at 3:22 PM, chuckamuck wrote:
In addition, using Netboot function of Mac Server is what I am leery
of on small scale server. Just seems a lot to ask without lots of
resources.
On 17 March 2010 19:30, Walter Davis email@hidden wrote:
There’s a half-step between full NetBoot and stand-alone machines that you
should look at. Workgroup Manager lets you set up user accounts without the
need to store the entire user environment on the server. The login is
negotiated with the server, but then the user data is still on the client
computer so you don’t have the huge resource drain of a full NetBoot
experience. There’s a way for laptop users to check out their account and go
on the road, too.
Yes, I think that’s one of the things I need to read up on. I’d pretty
much decided the full NetBoot thing wouldn’t be viable either for a
Mac Mini or with a wireless network but that sounds worth considering.
Either way it seems it’ll be best to have a dedicated Mac.
Oh, okay. In that case, those are the sorts of services which would
be just about the /only/ thing running on that server, and the
server would be tuned to give priority to those applications. If you
used either of those on a server that was also doing general
workgroup server duties, or Internet services, you’d probably have a
fairly miserable experience at everything.
It’s funny that those ideas originated at NeXT, Steve Jobs’ other
company. That was one of the crown jewels of NeXTSTEP – that the
interface of an application could be “torn off” and run on a
completely different machine on the network, so that you could, say,
run Photoshop on a beast-like server and control its interface from
a much smaller desktop somewhere else on the net, with only the
control instructions from the interface and the screen proxy of the
image you were working on traveling back and forth – the bulk of
the data would stay on the server and never go anywhere.
Which is sort of the way X Windows works, Apollo took the idea
further with their DCE product, where a broker would look round for a
suitable back end for the heavy lifting. When HP bought Apollo they
continued it in a diluted form.
David
–
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
email@hidden www.ivdcs.co.uk