Dissapointed by Leopard Server (even after 10.5.2)
By john on Feb 15, 2008 in Apple, featured
For a few months now I’ve been running OS X 10.5 Leopard Server on an older XServe I acquired. I’ve been using it as a gateway on my network, but also as an open directory, DNS and DHCP server as well. Initially, I was impressed – the setup seemed to go alright and it seemed to work well.
That is, until I tried to really do anything.
Now, before I get to what went wrong, let me start by saying that Leopard server has a LOT of very good potential. It does make some things (like setting up a Primary Domain Controller in samba) incredibly easy to do. Adding network users and getting them set up with roaming profiles (for windows) was significantly easier than doing the same on a linux server.
That said, let’s talk about where Leopard Server fails to shine. First we have AFP, which like SMB is a protocol for mounting remote filesystems. With Leopard Server, for me and a lot of others, it fails – regularly. Since it is used for using network home directories, when it fails I can’t sync my macbooks home directory with the server, and can’t log in to any of my other macs. It stays that way until I restart the service. It does this several times a day, at least.
Next we have the DHCP server. It’s flaky, at best. It will lose my static map list regularly, just fails to show them at all in the GUI. It’s set by default to ignore anything that queries it more frequently than once every 10 seconds – a problem for many as some devices query at 2 second intervals. And a few weeks ago it spontaneously decided to stop handing out router information to clients. The router info was there – in the config files – correctly, it just wouldn’t hand it out.
Next let’s look at the DNS service. There is either no, or very little, input validation. That’s bad, as it’s very easy to input a character that will cause the DNS service to fail, and once you’ve done that the only way to recover is editing files by hand using the terminal. The real kicker here is that the service ACTS like it started and is running just fine. There is NO feedback to you that something is horribly awry. If you’re LUCKY you might catch something in the logs that indicate there was a problem, and where it can be found. It took me a while to figure this one out. If there are characters that will cause the system to be unstable – please, put some validation on there.
Lastly, let’s talk briefly about mobile home directories. In concept, it’s great. In execution it leaves a LOT to be desired. Using the default settings for background sync – I figured they would be a good baseline to go off of and would enable me to make some small tweaks here and there to suit my environment. I was wrong. The baseline settings cause all kinds of problems with common programs (iphoto, itunes, Address Book…), you’d think Apple would have known that and put in some sane settings. It seems like every program and it’s mother (and it’s mothers mother) causes background sync to fail. This is INCREDIBLY annoying.
Beyond that, though, Sync gives almost NO indication to the user that it didn’t work. Sometimes it will even LOOK like it’s actually syncing data, but then you find out (sometimes days later) that it didn’t really work. How can you tell? The last synced date won’t change if it didn’t complete successfully. The issue here is that it otherwise will tell you it completed successfully – even if it did not.
The only way to find out for sure that it didn’t work, and why, is to look at the logs in console. Something most users won’t know how, or want, to do.
These are the gripes I have with Leopard Server. I had hoped that 10.5.2 would address some or all of these, but that’s not the case. I’m still trying to find resolutions to them, though online resources aren’t being very helpful.
Leopard has a lot of potential, but it’s one apple that needs some serious polishing.
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