[nycbug-talk] mad uptime

[Bob Ippolito]

On Jul 3, 2004, at 10:08 AM, Rick Aliwalas wrote:

> On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, Isaac Levy wrote:
>
>>> Funny, I
>>> got flamed by some folks in the class when I innocently asked (ok,
>>> trolled)
>>> what applications are they running that warrant a G5 server as 
>>> opposed
>>> to a
>>> *BSD box.  They came at me hard w/ the old windows argument that unix
>>> cmd-line is too cryptic, the learning curve is to high, its easier to
>>> train admins to use a gui,...
>>
>> Right.  *sigh*  This is exactly what I've been trying to express (To
>> Apple, in various ways) about their foray into the server world...
>> They have a hard time separating the Windows/Novel IT world which they
>> have competed in for years, from us UNIX folks- and loose business
>> because of it.
>>
>> They have a cool agenda, and have a lot of cool GUI work that comes
>> from years of competing with NT etc..., but their sales folks need to
>> step back and LISTEN to what the *Open Source UNIX Sysadmins* REALLY
>> want.
>
> For sure.  Just from a practical standpoint.  Suppose you have to 
> administer
> several Mac servers in a remote location behind multiple firewalls.
> Having good cmd line equivalents to the admin tools will make life
> much easier.  It's hard to script a gui...

Actually, OS X server has command line tools to do just about 
everything.. and all of the admin tools work via a xml over http based 
protocol, so it's not terrible hard to communicate with them even 
through firewalls.  Apple Remote Desktop 2 is easy enough to punch 
through firewalls now, too, because it also supports VNC (client and 
server).  It's also not just a virtual console, it now does all kinds 
of other things (install packages on 100 machines at once, etc.).

>> I know you didn't ask for it, but my answer to that question is this:
>> If you are involved with clustered supercomputing, G5 Servers are an
>> inexpensive dream to work with.  If you are working in an educational
>> enviornment or small orginization who needs a basic org. server
>> internally, and don't have massive resources to keep IT on staff to 
>> run
>> it, an XServe is great.  Also, if you are a sysadmin who comes from 
>> the
>> NT/Novel/GUI world of things, (these folks getting fewer and fewer
>> nowadays), it's dreamy too.
>> If you are doing any server-side graphics processing and mass storage,
>> on the public internet or internally, again, dreamy...
>
> I definitely asked for it ;)  That's good info as I was under the 
> impression
> that the G5 servers were seriously expensive.

The Xserve G5s are seriously price competitive with equivalent stuff 
from other vendors...  Especially Xsan <http://www.apple.com/xsan/> and 
the Xserve RAID.

-bob
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