OS X Leopard Server: A good start, but needs improvement.
By john on Feb 2, 2008 in Apple, featured
For a little over a month now I’ve been running Leopard server on my XServe. I’m using it as my gateway machine and have a variety of services running on it. Chief among those services is Open Directory, which serves the portable home directory I use on my Macbook Pro but also serves network home directories for my other macs and windows machines. Throughout the time I’ve been running it I’ve become well acquainted with it’s little bugs, as well as a few major ones.
First we’ve got the DNS admin panel in Server Admin. There appears to be next to no input validation – despite the fact that certain input characters WILL cause DNS to stop working properly (and in fact will prevent it from reloading data, will make your zone information disappear and generally cause a whole slew of other weird problems.) It also gives no indication that stuff isn’t working – you can start the service and it’s status shows as if everything were OK – the only way to diagnose that there even IS a problem is to watch the logs with verbose logging turned on.
Second, and this is an issue I’ve yet to figure out a solution for – is with the DHCP server. It’s performed VERY flaky for me so far, and just the other day it suddenly stopped handing out default gateway information to clients – the end result being that as each of my machines rebooted and got their addresses from the server they would suddenly be cut off from the ‘net. While that one issue was resolved (I had to re-enter the router IP in the DHCP admin panel, despite the fact that it was already there and was correct) there’s another issue that is INCREDIBLY annoying, and it has to do with static maps. I set up the majority of the devices on my network to have a statically mapped ip handed out via dhcp – it helps keep the network organized. Unfortunately the Leopard DHCP server randomly stops displaying the static maps in it’s admin panel. One second they’re there – the next they’re gone. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for this – it just happens. The static maps are still obeyed, but editing them or being able to see what addresses are already taken is impossible.
Now, let’s take a look at AFP. It’s got a nasty bug where it will stop responding and have to be restarted. This means that, until I have restarted it, I’m unable to sync my portable home directory on my MacBook Pro. I also am unable to access network home directories on any of my other machines. Restarting the service restores that functionality. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to do this at any particular point – sometimes it happens after a mere 15 minutes running, other times it runs for a day or more before requiring a restart. I’ve not been able to correlate it with any particular thing to determine what is causing this. I do know bug reports have been filed with Apple on it, and it’s a somewhat widespread issue.
Aside from that I’ve had the server kernel panic on me 3 or 4 times and spontaneously reboot on a handful of occasions. It’s clear it suffers from some stability issues.
I know that Apple is hard at work on the 10.5.2 update that should hopefully resolve some or all of these issues. From what I’ve been told the update weighs in at over 400mb, which would lead me to believe it resolves a lot of issues. I’ve been hearing talk that it would be available soon, I sure hope so.
This version of OS X server has a lot of potential, but in it’s initial release version (and the 10.5.1 update) it drops the ball. As with any new OS, though, it will go through a period of bugs and issues that are generally worked out pretty quickly. I’m looking forward to the server Nirvana I’m sure is to come with 10.5.2+.
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Hey — I came across this posting while searching for “10.5 Server DNS information disappearing” — this is the only post I’ve found that mentions this, and thank you! It’s been driving me NUTS that my DNS zone information has been disappearing on me! I still don’t know why, but every time I add information/specs about a machine (in the area where you can enter machine details), as soon as I hit save, my zone info is gone. I have absolutely no idea how to get it back either!?!? I’ve now wiped my server 2 times because of this…and I’m running 10.5.6!!!!
Kristin Maling | Mar 12, 2009 | Reply
At 10.6.2 and I am STILL experiencing the Disappearing act put on by the DHCP Static Maps window.
Dave Hamdon | Mar 21, 2010 | Reply
That is unfortunate, Dave. I’ve not played around too much with 10.6 server, though was somewhat hopeful that they’d have fixed that functionality by now.
john | Mar 29, 2010 | Reply