My name is Jesse and I’m the IT Manager for a small business with offices in Vancouver and Toronto. Over the years, I’ve managed to get Mac OS X Server machines used as the backbone of our IT infrastructure.

With the announcement by Apple that the XServe is being discontinued, I fear that any serious adoption of OS X Server as an enterprise OS will stall, if not recede entirely. I am personally and professionally frustrated, because while Linux and BSD are close to OS X, but I don’t particularly want to work with other OSes, because I think OS X is just great.

Some of us are starting a grassroots campaign to let Apple know how much they’ve let us down. I doubt it will change their minds, but we aim to try.

http://www.savethexserve.com/

Cheers,

- Jesse S

Let’s see if Apple hears the cries of those who enjoy their Xserve. I sure don’t want to try rack mounting the Mac Pro :)

As of today, the Xserve’s days are officially numbered. 87, to be exact. Come January 31st, 2011, Apple will no longer be selling Xserves.¹ What a shame.

As the transition guide (PDF; linked to from the Xserve Resources page) explains, the two options going forward will be the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server and the Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server. To me, the gap seems painfully wide, with the following completely lost:

• A powerful 1U option. Yes, you can fit 2+ Mac mini servers in 1U, but that’s not always the correct solution, nor will it yield the same raw processing throughput. Only being able to fit two Mac Pros in a whopping 12U of rack space is an astounding waste of space unless you actually need the internal storage & PCI Express expansion.
• Hot swappable internal storage. I won’t miss the price tag of Apple’s drive modules, that’s for sure, but they did an excellent job of ensuring they were actually enterprise-grade. It’s slightly painful to think that both their server options will require a power down and to be pulled out of the rack² just to swap a drive.
• Redundant power supplies. I’m all for the lower power consumption of the Mac minis and Mac Pros, but the fact that Apple will have no server hardware that can be gracefully transitioned between power sources is very disappointing for those needing high availability.
• Lights-Out Management. I personally don’t use LOM, and I frequently hear complaints about Apple’s LOM implementation, but the number of times I could’ve used it and not had to send someone to the server room (or drive in myself) is way up there. So, not even having it as an option is an additional downer. Maybe someday the Mac Pro will get LOM.

That said, the Mac Pro is a far more formidable piece of hardware than the Xserve, and the pricing of the Mac Pro with Snow Leopard Server, much like the Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server, is pretty much just throwing in a copy of Snow Leopard Server. Also, as Brian Stucki of Macminicolo.net put it on Twitter, “WAY too many small business put money into [an Xserve] when a Mac mini would have been perfect.”

It’s clear that Apple is saying goodbye to “Enterprise” and honing in on the SMB market.

¹ Of course, there may be some old stock available through Apple Specialists and Apple Authorized Resellers.

² If you have two Mac Pros on a shelf in a four-post rack, you can probably, depending on the positioning of side panels & cross-members, pull the side off of one of them to swap drives. Pain in the ass, though.

—–

Unfortunately, my experience today does not support the conclusion that Apple has fixed the GUI in the Disk Utility included with OS 10.6.3.

I was forced to rely on the command line to add a replacement disk to a degraded RAID-1 because no amount of dragging and dropping in the DU window worked. The drag-and-drop would not place the replacement drive within the existing RAID set and the rebuild button never became active.

But the process was simpler than your prior description.

Wanting to take no chances with the data, I first cloned the data off the degraded RAID from the operating drive with Carbon Copy Cloner. In fact, I cloned it twice, to two different drives. Better safe than sorry.

I installed a new, replacement drive of equal capacity to the operating drive in my MacPro and initialized it as a single partition with a unique and easily identifiable name.

Using the command line in Terminal, I used the command “diskutil list” to get the disk numbers of all the disks installed in my MacPro.

Then, with no other commands necessary, I entered:

diskutil repairMirror disk4 disk0

Disk4 is the disk ID of the degraded RAID-1
Disk0 is the disk ID of the new drive

This command re-initialized the freshly initialized new disk I installed (called disk0), added it to RAID with the new name “RAID Slice disk0s2″, removed the name of the previously missing, failed member of the RAID-1, and automatically began rebuilding the array.

Much more efficient to type one command to do it all but I would rather that the GUI-based disk utility function as it should. It would be much more intuitive – and isn’t that what Apple products are supposed to be about?

—–

Matt also followed up to my email to which I had asked a few questions.

—–

The failed drive was NOT the boot drive.

I was NOT using the OSX 10.6.3 Install DVD as my boot disk. I was booted from my 10.6.3 normal boot hard drive.

And one other thing. I purposely and deliberately screwed up my RAID-1 just to see whether, in fact, Apple did fix the DU GUI. The drive itself did not go bad. I just wanted to experiment and I’m glad that I did. After the RAID rebuilt with the replacement drive perfectly in 4 hours, I deliberately failed the RAID again by removing the replacement drive and reinserting the original drive. I used the same command again and the original drive was reitialized and resynced to the still functioning drive just fine, only that took 7 hours. The only difference? My original drives are Seagate 1-TBs. The replacement test drive that I used was a borrowed WD RE3 1TB model. I think I’ll get four of those puppies! I guess there’s nothing like having two processing chips in a hard drive to almost halve the write times.

By all means, feel free to publish my comments. I wrote to you specifically to share my experience with you and your readers. The more all of us share our knowledge, the easier it becomes for other folks.

Best wishes,

Matt S.

That said, I’d like to myself try replicating the issue just to verify that once again the Disk Utility in 10.3.6 is broken. It’s too bad because it’s a lot easier to just drag and drop and new disk into Disk Utility rather then having to run through the command line.

While there have been recent reminders regarding Tiger Server, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Server and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard should be fine, right? Actually, prior to Security Update 2009-005, Leopard Server was running Clam AV 0.94, so you’ll need to make sure it’s fully updated — I managed to find one Leopard Server mail server that had not been updated yet. Snow Leopard Server is good to go, though.

So, make sure you check your ClamAV version on both your Tiger & Leopard Server mail servers.

Since I’m on-call 24/7 and must be ready to respond whether I’m on the couch or on a long trip, my primary workstation is the thin & light MacBook Air. I certainly wouldn’t mind carrying just an iPad with me wherever I went, but there are a few caveats for a server admin like me. While the iPhone OS’s copy & paste support is stellar and was worth the wait, the lack of multitasking could certainly make life more tedious in some cases or downright impossible in others. The iPad supports current iPhone/iPod touch applications at their existing resolutions (or at 2x size) and I have no doubt that the developers of SSH apps and such will update them to support the new resolution & keyboards quite quickly, but there are key apps missing. They’ve developed excellent new versions of the iWork apps for use on the iPad, but I’d need them to port Server Admin, Workgroup Manager, and Apple Remote Desktop for me to actually give up my MacBook Air.

It’s sexy. It has the potential. It certainly has the screen resolution and performance to take on such tasks. I’ll even guarantee that plenty of third-party tools will be developed for server admins using the iPad, but I hope Apple sees the light and brings over their own admin tools as well.

Here’s a one-liner for removing all MySQL bin logs older than 30 days:

sudo find /var/mysql -name "mysql-bin.0*" -mtime +30 -exec rm {} +

Obviously, any command like this that automates deletion of potentially needed data could be disastrous, so make sure you have a good backup of your data before you try it. The benefit of the above command is that you can remove ‘-exec rm {} +‘ from the end of it to do a dry-run without actually removing any files and it’ll merely list the file names. Also, if you want preserve all bin logs newer than 60 days, simply change to read ‘-mtime +60‘, or whatever best fits your needs.

Depending on your usage & backup setup, you could certainly automate this using cron or launchd.

macminicolo.net has posted their 2009 state of the Mac mini, including their test drive and photos (un-boxing & take-apart) of the new Mac mini w/Snow Leopard Server. Interesting tidbits I was unaware of are:

• The new Mac minis will accept 8GB of RAM and the now-previous ones only need a firmware upgrade to do so.
• AppleCare covers GUI-based server & network management issues for the Mac mini w/Snow Leopard Server, but “isn’t the case if you buy a Mac mini and Snow Leopard Server separately.”
• Approximately 70% of their customers use Mac OS X client. I shouldn’t be surprised due the former pricing, but I think the killer combination of Snow Leopard Server only costing $499 for unlimited clients and bundling it with a Mac mini configuration will change all of that.

They also remind the naysayers who complain about lack of additional Ethernet ports “that Apple’s USB Ethernet Adapter works fine on a mini. Just plug it in and you’re set.”

[Via Daring Fireball]

The Deluxe plan starts at $9.95/year, is ad-free, and includes the following features above and beyond Basic:

• Up to 50 whitelist/blacklist domains (up from 25)
• A whitelist-only mode
• Advanced customization options
• Archived stats & logs for 1 year (up from 2 weeks)
• Email technical support 9-5 (Pacific) on weekdays (in addition to opendns.com/support)

According to the press release, “Notable features included in OpenDNS Enterprise include”:

Malware Site Protection to secure networks from online threats, Delegated Administration to allow multiple administrators across multiple locations to administer accounts, Block-Page Bypass functionality, which makes OpenDNS cloud-based Web content filtering more flexible and allows administrators and trusted individuals to bypass filtering when necessary, and more comprehensive reporting and statistics offerings, including a daily PDF report of network activity delivered via email.

Obviously, that’s in addition to the Basic & Deluxe features. You’ll have to call for Enterprise pricing.

[Via OpenDNS]

Along with other new products and a refresh of the Mac mini line, Apple has now come to their senses and is offering a Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server! For $999 you get a Mac mini w/2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB RAM, and—get this—the optical drive has been ditched to make room for a second hard drive, so two 500GB 2.5″ 5400-RPM SATA hard drives. Oh, and Snow Leopard Server, of course.

It seems like this is going to be a great deal, especially assuming that the $599 Mac mini is spec’d with 2.26GHz processor, 2GB RAM, and $160GB hard drive, and SuperDrive. I’ve been using a Mac mini as a server for years and would love to add one of these to my network.

Update: They note that you can use the MacBook Air SuperDrive (USB) if you need an optical drive. I’ve always found a MacBook in FireWire Target Disk mode to be more than adequate, in a pinch.

[Via Topicdesk Newsletters]