Do we need a server?

I’m always amused when Scott says, “People would probably like to hear what you have to say about…” 

I don’t know if this stuff is helping anyone, but it keeps me off the streets.

I remember the first time I became aware of the word “server.” For some reason it sounded very mysterious, something that required arcane tools and deep learning with the elves in the mountains.

Eventually, I came to figure out that a “server” is simply a computer — any computer — that provides “services” to other computers. If you computer can share its files, it’s a file server. If you turn iTunes music sharing on, your computer becomes a music server. If you have a shared printer, your computer has become a print server.

Apple makes it super-easy to turn any Mac into a server by going to Apple menu > System Preferences > Sharing (or Spotlight “sharing”) and turning on any of the services you need. Your Mac will then show up in the “Shared” section of any Finder window. Boom, you got a server.

That said, when most people refer to a server, they’re talking about some machine that doesn’t do anything else, a box that’s tucked away, maybe in a rack or a closet, and always on, with a nice big battery backup, maybe a few hard drives, and fans like a wind tunnel. And most servers on the planet should be that robust; I need Google’s mail servers or my web server at GoDaddy never to go down, or at least, if they do need a reboot, that there’s a backup server waiting next to it in the data center to kick in as soon as its brother goes down.

A lot of businesses have one or more servers at the workplace. Sometimes they’re just file servers, a central repository for the documents that everyone needs access. Sometimes they’re also mail servers, a popular option among Microsoft-certified professionals when outsourced email hosts weren’t as flexible or affordable as they are now. Again, to be clear: most organizations with fewer than 40 or 50 users would be wasting precious money to purchase Microsoft Small Business Server, when they can sign up with Google Apps either for free or for $50/user/year (40 users for $2,000/year, versus an easy $10,000 just to install and configure, not to mention maintain and troubleshoot, a Windows Server).

So let’s say you just need to share documents among more than 10 people, and you need them available all the time, and time without them costs money. Until this last Tuesday, the best value in a server-class machine was Apple’s Xserve. 

Way powerful, way configurable, way manageable – The specs on each generation of Xserve have been increasingly impressive, and it starts at a $3,000 base price that has always included the $1,000 OS X Server (unlimited-client; Windows Server starts at 5 users, and costs $50 per user after that). Most Xserve buyers should expect to pay at least $5,000-6,000 for a properly configured unit with 3 hard drives, a redundant supply, external backups, and if one is smart, the AppleCare server support plan. I can usually have a new OS X Server set up, with a few connected workstations, in under 6 hours.

A Bit of History

Apple’s server software (a.k.a. server operating system, or “OS”) is Mac OS X Server, now in version 10.6 (a.k.a. Snow Leopard Server). For so many years, AppleShare server products (still promoted in Australia!) distinguished themselves in IT discourse only by being pretty crappy. It just didn’t have the moxy that system admins were used to getting from Microsoft Windows NT or its descendants. And when OS X Server came out — it was actually the first release of OS X — it was really more of a theory than an operating system. Even though it was built on the well-established UNIX platform, it was buggy and slow, and it had these really weird quirks that made it very frustrating. Certainly it was impossible for an IT administrator to recommend that a business rely on this system for their day-to-day operations. 

Today, OS X Server has evolved into a robust, stable platform, one that’s easy to set up, easy to expand and scale, and like the basic OS X (we might call it “OS X client”), Server is impressively compatible with other platforms and standards. Since OS X Server and the Xserve came into their own, and given products such as Xsan and Final Cut Server, Apple is officially a viable player in the world of business and enterprise.

The Value of a Server

Is all of this worth several thousand dollars to your organization? It sure can be, once you realize the other things you can do with a server, which I’ll get to in a second. First, I have to say that this article is inspired by Apple’s announcement today of a Mac mini server. This $1,000 box is now potentially my favorite item in the entire product line, as I think it spells great things for businesses large and small. Considering that Apple has now slashed the price of the software itself to an unbeatable $500 for unlimited users, buying into a Microsoft server product now just seems unwise and wasteful.

So what can you do with a server? Check this out:

~ File Sharing, Network homes, and Backups: We can tie all of your Macs to your server so that the ”home folder” for each user account is stored on the server. This means anybody can use any Mac in the house, and use their own desktop and files and email and settings. And if one computer dies, you put a new one in its place, log that person in, et voila! You’re back in business.

+ Portable Home Directories: This includes laptops, which can sync their accounts to the server, backing themselves up whenever they’re in the office.

~ Software Updates: We can have the server download all your software updates, and the administrator can pick and choose which one should be rolled out. When someone logs in, even a non-admin user, they’ll have an opportunity to install the approved updates, and their Mac only has to go across the office network, not all the way back to Apple’s servers.

~ Preferences: You can choose apply settings for all users in one fell swoop: adding a printer, adding items to the Dock, or automatically mounting a share point (definition); or perhaps restricting things along the order of parental controls, or preventing or allowing certain applications.

~ NetBoot & NetRestore: You can actually have your Macs start up from a disk image (definition) on the server. If you need to update all Macs, just update the image. A variation on this idea is to have the Macs install themselves from a central image.

Of all of these possibilities, certainly it is having a centralized place for data storage and backup, and for backing up your workstations, that makes in-house servers attractive, and possibly essential, for any organization of any size. 

Keep your head in the cloud

I say possibly essential, because there are now services on the internet, such as Google Docs and DropBox, that have begun replacing server hardware for many people. I am all in favor of using these online applications, with the sole caution that we don’t rely on them to back up our data. It is crucial to keep an on-premises copy of every piece of data that means anything to you, just as keeping an offsite copy is de rigueur in any comprehensive backup scheme. I use a Firefox plug-in that downloads all my Google docs, and I backup that folder to an external hard drive.

But if you need fast, reliable storage that all your computers can see, to centralize your data and keep your Macs humming in unison, there’s nothing like a properly configured OS X Server.

Posted via email from J2 Tech Blog

So far, Snow good: 10.6 in brief

Posted via email from j2mac’s posterous

Completely backup iPhone

This is a nice thing to do before running an iPhone software update.

1) Click on the iTunes menu, and go to Preferences…

2) Click on Devices.

3) In the list of Device Backups, with the dates, click on each of your backups, then below, click the button called Delete Backup.

4) In the left-hand column in iTunes, right-click on your iPhone, and click Backup.

LaCie SilverKeeper updated

LaCie wrote this free backup app called SilverKeeper a long time ago, and I quite liked it, but I had a hard time counting on it. It seemed like they weren’t serious about it. But they recently updated it to be a fully OS X Leopard-compatible, universal binary app. I’m testing it out now on a network volume, and will update this post with my findings.

Update: So far so good. I have SilverKeeper installed at a couple of environments, and it appears to be reliable and unobtrusive.

My iPhone 2.0 Saga, Part III: Good news/bad news

I started getting this really annoying error in iTunes, when trying to check for updates in the App Store:

“We could not complete your iTunes Store request.
An unknown error occurred (5002).

There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please try again later.”

I had resolved this once in the past by deleting and redownloading apps, but that didn’t work this time. So, since the 2.1 update seemed to go so well with just a straight “Update”, I thought I’d see if the iPhone backup process really was fixed. I didn’t mention in Parts I or II that the 2.0 backup-and-restore system, besides taking an obnoxiously long time, also failed to restore all the preferences to the phone, thus requiring at least a partial reconfiguration of my device.

After ensuring that my backups were turned on, and that the MobileSync folder had a recent backup (only 7.9MB!), your intrepid correspondent hit the Restore button in iTunes. And…

…It worked! The restore process itself was pretty quick, though It took a while to reïnstall all the apps and the music and the photos and the podcasts, but that’s due to my own particular digital gluttony. All my app preferences and other configs and address book and SMS messages and everything came back. All I had to do was reörganize the apps on the Springboard (they installed alphabetically, which is understandable, though I still want Apple to make that easy).

But…

The stupid iTunes error remains. Last time, I tried changing my iTS password and reëntering my credit card info, according to suggestions in the Apple discussions, but that didn’t work, and I really don’t think that’s a reasonable fix, since Apple doesn’t let you use the same password that you’ve used in the last year.

I’m going to do further research on that, but the successful restore was worth an immediate post. 

P.S. I like umlauts.

Old G4 with processor upgrade is crashing

I have a G4 running 10.4.  I upgraded the processor last year.  It’s now panicking often. Blue screens. Freezes. Fun, fun. I am sure the original processor is somewhere, nearby, packed in a moving box.

The only thing I really want to save on that tower is, predictably, my iTunes library which is on a 2nd hard drive which is mounted separately from the original disk.

I suspect a new Mac will be purchased very soon. I have an original Drobo, but have yet to purchase drives for it.

Allow the yelling about backing up to commence.

I’m a bit biased here, as I have always distrusted processor upgrades. They just seemed more trouble and expense than benefit. Now with the Intel machines, I figure they’re pretty much irrelevant.

Your G4 may be salvageable, but I really do think you need a new Mac. Bite that bullet, bubba. And to get your data off the G4, if it won’t boot to FireWire target disk mode by booting while holding down the “T” key, you can buy a Firewire enclosure or even better, a data cable such as this one, for the internal hard drives from which you need to rescue data.

Excellent work buying that Drobo. Now about those drives…

And then… BAAAAAAACCKK UPPPPPPPP!!!!

iPhone 2.1: so far, so good

I haven’t gotten a chance to post my iPhone saga. Gonna do that next, but right here I just want to record that I was able to run the plain ol’ software update from within iTunes, and it went smooth as silk. So far, the phone is behaving, and backups in iTunes do happen a lot faster, as promised, so this post should be less relevant from here on out.

I haven’t put battery life to the full test. Here’s hoping…!

Drobo failure

Man, I love my Drobo. I even wrote about it for our local alt-newsweekly. We’ve installed Drobos at several clients, and we’ve never had occasion to consider any other mass-storage device. Their support has been stellar … up to now.

Two weeks ago, the drive volume on my Drobo went belly-up. Couldn’t access it except for just long enough — THANK GOODNESS — to back up everything. I tried reformatting it but the damn thing won’t stay mounted.

The thing is, I wouldn’t mind as much if the Drobo engineers weren’t still, purportedly, looking at my diagnostic file, after a WEEK. I’m stuck. It was easy enough to retrieve my financial data, but my music and multimedia remain in limbo on a single external hard drive. I want to try another reformat, or maybe buy an additional SATA drive to increase storage (it wasn’t near full, and all of the disk lights were all-systems-go green), but I really just need to hear something from the engineers to set my mind at ease.

Stop Time Machine from nagging about every external disk

Straight from afp548.com:

Wednesday, January 09 2008 @ 09:37 pm CST
Contributed by: macshome

A while back I posted a tip on a useful, but little known, preference setting for dealing with the Kerberos Agent dialog box. Today I’m posting another little known setting to handle an even more annoying box. The time machine “Use this disk for backup?” dialog.

The scenario is like this. Every time you plug in a different external disk time machine asks if you want to use it for backups. This is fine for the home user that can just click the No button, and get on with life. This is a giant pain in a managed deployment though as the setting is set per machine, not disk. Imagine if you have 3,000 Macs and 500 external disks that float around. That’s a lot of nag windows and a lot of chances for users to screw up. What we need is a way to set a policy that tells time machine to not ask about every disk that is plugged in. That way we can guide the users to the correct result. Here it is (one line):

defaults write com.apple.timemachine DoNotOfferNewDisksForBackup -bool YES

As with the Kerberos setting, I would push this with policy so that you don’t need to touch every Mac by hand.

Totally great enhancements to OS X

I’m editing this from my old web page. I’ll do an updated list soon; meanwhile I tweaked this, struck out some old stuff, and emboldened my favorites. Since I’ve been blogging, I’ve posted many more entries like this, but I want to preserve this list as a sample of the Mac tweaks I use all the time. I believe that the key to making OS X work best for you is to customize it. There are so many fantastic 3rd-party apps and add-ons out there, and often for free. The modern Mac can handle more of these tweaks than one might think, and without hiccupping a bit. If I like them, and they’re shareware, I’ve paid the few bucks, and they’ve had a great effect on my productivity. (Note: this list is mostly not about stand-alone applications, but rather plug-ins that modify the operation of the Mac.)

SMARTreporter - get notified if one of your hard drives is going to fail. Of course, even if it does, you’re fine, because you’re backing up every day, right?

MondoMouse - I’m putting this so close the top because I’m totally in love with it! Resize or move windows without clicking on a window handle. Totally crucial for smaller screens, especially.

Déjà Vu – If you’re not backing up every day, you will lose something precious at some time in your computing life. I may not even touch your computer if you don’t have an external backup. So, we can use Déjà Vu to schedule backups. Plug in your Firewire drive, and enjoy peace of mind. SuperDuper and ChronoSync are also fantastic. Slightly different tools for different situations. Time Machine is an amazing piece of software, but after almost a year with it, I still find it very hard to trust as one’s exclusive backup method. We almost always have at least a SuperDuper clone on a separate partition. (By the way, if you were wondering, Apple’s Backup is kind of terrible, but the next version of OS X —10.5 Leopard, due this Spring — will include a program called Time Machine that promises a great new era in backups.)

AppleScript and Automator – Yes, I know these are built-in, but the point is fantastic sites such as Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes and automator.us and Automator World are just fantastic for boosting one’s efficiency.

LaunchBar – The future of search was in our hands well before Tiger was announced! I can’t wait to see how LB incorporates with Apple’s next-generation operating system.

Quicksilver – A lot like LaunchBar, but free and with all kinds of neat little plug-ins built in. Quicksilver can also replace Spark to launch apps with keyboard shortcuts. I prefer the LaunchBar/Spark/Synergy/PTHPasteboard setup, mostly because Quicksilver ran a little slow on my PowerBook. Now that I’ve added memory to my laptop, I might give QS another try.

Default Folder X – How to get to favorite and recent files instantaneously. Tried-and-true since OS 9. Fantastic in a production environment.

PTHPasteboard – This free multi-item clipboard dramatically reduces my having to switch between applications. Keyboard activated, of course, or what would be the point. (BTW, Quicksilver has this, and Spark, and Synergy, all built-in.)

Spark – Set up your own shortcut keys

Unsanity haxies – These folks have been the most consistently great developers for minor-but-major add-ons for OS X. Check out:

• WindowShade – Bring back that useful little OS 9 feature
• Menu Master – instantly assign a keyboard shortcut to any menu item

Peter Maurer – I don’t use these so much anymore, but Maurer’s stuff is genius, much like the Unsanity group. He does Butler, which is a lot like LaunchBar and QuickSilver, but you should also look at:

• TextExpander – Autocompletes text that you type frequently (the company SmileOnMyMac bought it from him recently)
• Witch – Enhances the Apple-Tab application switching to include all open windows

Salling Clicker – the best reason to buy a Bluetooth phone
So cool, and man I miss it from my Sony-Ericsson & Treo days, but it ain’t available for the iPhone. The developer comments here.

MailUnreadStatusBar – puts a count of unread e-mails in your menu bar
Or you could go for Inbox Zero.

Synergy – best-of-breed iTunes control

You Control – I gotta admit, for a one-stop package, it’s worth every cent.
Haven’t used it in a while. It seemed to take a lot of resources.

MenuCalendarClock – iCal integration in a highly configurable menu-bar clock. And now there’s a new, free menu bar widget called MagiCal that does much of the same thing.

Text Wielder – a collection that will show in the Services submenu of any Cocoa (OS X-native) application. Look for more Services, such as CalcService, on VersionTracker. (Note: The link to TextWielder will begin downloading the disk image.)
Services were a fine idea, but they just never seem to have made it.

SBook – convert text to an Address Book card
Definitely made moot by Leopard’s Data Detectors

Just good software:

VueScan – The best scanning software available, and compatible with just about any scanner you can plug into your Mac

GraphicConverter – a great “can opener” for hundreds of kinds of image files

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