Tiger Server 10.4 Makes Me Growl

Well it is WWDC time and Apple has released information about my friend and your’s Mac OS X Server, the new improved version. We finally get mobile home directories, I am really excited about that, but then Apple talks about “Certificate management”….gee I wonder if you can rename the cert files (when you serve more than one site) and have apache start? That might be too much to ask, but I am glad Apple thinks it is something to mention. I also wonder how they are going to address the change ip issue. Time will tell, but I will not hold my breath. I would love to go somewhere, most likely a school district, set up Mac OS X Server to serve exactly like Apple thinks it should serve and have everything just work. I know it can, but if you try anything different…you will find problems. (see past posts) Mac OS X Server scares me for serveral reasons, but none more than the idea of UNIX admins looking at Apple’s awesome hardware and then being completely disappointed with the OS when trying to customize it. (you know, like adding more than one ErrorDocuments for a custom error reporting script…who would ever want that?) I can deal with Mac OS X Server issues…but I do not want to see other’s put off by Apple’s weird configurations. How can users talk to developers…and have the developers actually respond to the user’s issues? I have had engineers duplicate problems and release after release the issues still remain. Thoughts? We now have the hardware that is attracting high end users, let’s give them the software too!