Sunday, January 17, 2010

Snow Leopard Server

So as you can tell from previous posts, we moved from Leopard Server to Snow Leopard server. The move wasn't without a TON of pain. The hope was that things would be significantly better on the new version. Some things (unlimited client licenses) are better, but most things are just.. different.

There's still plenty of signs that its a mostly untested piece of software from apple. The fact that there's a button in the mail configuration to enable antivirus but when you push it it doesnt work shows that basic testing hasn't been done. If you run into this, as we did, you can find solutions online.

There are other annoyances/totally broken areas, i'll list a few:

  • Groups don't work as mail distribution lists anymore. Not sure how they broke this, but they did
  • Calendar invites from outside your domain do not go to your domain calendar, and if you try to copy/place it on the right calendar you get: The server responded: "HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden" to operation CalDAVWriteEntityQueueableOperation.
  • You still have to hack the server to enable RADIUS for VPN authentication. Apple has it fixed to do wifi auth and didn't think this through
  • Mail aliases still are not supported so you still have to sudo vi /etc/aliases in the terminal to manage these. Then you need to deal with any races in it overwriting on its periodic updates as you edit the file
  • They have not thought through the whole internal versus external naming/conventions around their web mail/management interface to the point that its almost impossible to make use of

Thats just the list from the top of my head. The main point being that if you're thinking about using OSX Server for your business, and as much as it hurts me to say so, i'd say don't and go use Exchange. Sure its more expensive, harder to manage, etc, but the thing works and Microsoft, unlike Apple, seems to care about it.

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