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Re: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard - use as a server? YES

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg84561] Re: Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard - use as a server? YES
  • From: Marc Heusser <marc.heusser at byeheusser.commercialspammers.invalid>
  • Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2008 20:32:26 -0500 (EST)
  • Organization: University of Zurich
  • References: <fheg2d$ls1$1@smc.vnet.net>

In article <fheg2d$ls1$1 at smc.vnet.net>,
 robert prince-wright <robertprincewright at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I visited the Apple Mac store this past weekend to see a demo - and was a 
> little shocked that the demo machine crashed four times in one hour. It 
> seemed like iCal, Time Machine and iPhoto are not stable and likely to be a 
> huge pain. I also note there is a major bug which results in lost files 
> during copy and move operations. All this makes me wonder whether or not to 
> wait till next year.

Macworld Expo is 14-18 Jan 2008 - traditionally the place to announce 
new products. This is the time to buy a Mac, after the new announcements.
I hope this is not too late.

I have been using Mac OS 10.5 since it came out. There have been 
occasional quirks but now at 10.5.1 it is stable and works well as do 
the applications. So no more waiting. The four crashes in an hour seem 
to point to a hardware problem in my experience. 10.5 was very good out 
of the gates.

> > Can others share their experience with the nascent operating systems. Are 
> there Vista fans out there who would recommend Vista over Leopard.

Cannot help you there - but mostly Vista was compared with the 
predecessor 10.4 of Mac OS X. Mac OS X mostly won, and often Vista was 
said to be a nicer looking XP. Leopard has many real improvements over 
the previous version. It even runs faster on the same hardware!
If this is any indication, my fellow medical students either have a Mac 
or will get one when they buy their next computer.
Small wonder, looking at tools like Osirix they can get for free 
(http://www.osirix-viewer.com/).
If you long for Windows, you can also install that on a separate 
partition and either boot from there or run Windows in a Window under 
Mac OS X with Parallels, VMware etc.

> I would also be interested in hearing from people running website 
> applications under Tiger or Leopard. For example, would it be practical to 
> have a small business web server on an iMac or would i need a Powermac?

A web server typically is not taxing on a computer unless you are 
serving many clients at the same time and have a VERY fast uplink to the 
internet. I used a Mac mini with great success as my web and mailserver, 
and will use a newer Mac mini soon.
An iMac makes a great server unless you want multiple disks (as backups 
for example). You could use an older MacPro for more disks. If you want 
the ultimate there is Xserve, but for a small business this may be 
overkill. It does sport redundant power supplies etc if you need it.
You can run it with the standard Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard installation, it 
has industrial strength Apache as webserver, and includes php perl as 
well as sqllite. If you want more, install the free MAMP (Mac, Apache, 
MYSQL, PHP).
Administration is simplified with Mac OS X 10.5 Server, you get many 
handy User interfaces for tools already in the client version.

With all these options you get an industrial strength server, well 
configured to start with. Apache serves most of the high traffic sites. 
And they all have ipfw as a firewall, as you get with Mac OS X.

You may want to check hardware requirements for Mc OS X 10.5 at
http://www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs/
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/specs.html

HTH

Marc

-- 
remove bye and from mercial to get valid e-mail
<http://www.heusser.com>


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