network servers

D

didde

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Hi all!

Recently I actually managed to get our company's CEO to agree to get rid of our WIN2000 server environment. It has been nothing but trouble 24/7. Constant reboots, updates and so on..

The problem is that I only know WIN2000, and since we're now changing platforms I figured the best place to get some info would be on this forum. Even though I know Macs really good (and have been working with them for ages) I'm not really certain that OS X Server is "mature" enough for us to out to use.

The workgroup our current servers serve is about 50 people large, but the work we do put immense stress on the server... What I am looking for is ONE server that is powerful enough to run mail, file and some web services. Now we have nine machines doing that and trying to administer all of these is a ****.

A while back I worked with a website hosted on Solaris 8. That was an impressive experience... Anyone out there who has had some good / bad experiences with Solaris?

What we're looking for is good uptime and minimal administration. Of course there'll always be problems along the way, but there's no way around that.

Any help in this matter would be widely appreciated!

Thanks.
 
Ok these are my thoughts about os x server.

The File Server

For Mac users this server is A1 you can move large file over your network very fast. Its rock solid I have yet to reboot a OS X Server because of a crash. I have installed over twenty OS X Servers with no complaints. As long as you are in a 100% mac enviroment this is a sound investment.

If you have a mixture of mac and pc's it works fine but I am not happy with the SMB Services. I'm getting errors in copying off files between MAC's and PC's. Characters not supported and all that 10.1.3 solves alot of these problems but not all.

The Mail Server

This is very basic it allows you to setup Imap POP3 and SMTP Services. Only with the last update (10.1.3) can you turn off Relaying.

The Web Server (Apache)

What can I say about this, from what I have seen the web guys love it. I have not had much time to play with this but I have heard nothing bad. If anything it has been how good it is.

Macintosh Manager (NetBoot)

I have really warmed to this little Gem it has it quirks with some applications, that run on the client end but nothing to bad. Great for locking down those Mac's in classrooms.

A very good source of information on os x server is on the apple website here is the URL http://discussions.info.apple.com/
At the moment you cannot post questions but you can read other peoples problems and questions.

My pennys worth I would never run a mail server on the same machine as my file server. Two reasons one virus that are sent by email, two mail services slow down your server and data copys as people will be sending and receiving emails every minute. Putting in a second ethernet card will help but my concerns are if you get a email virus the whole lot is down.

Hope this is of some help
 
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