X Server's Workgroup Manager is a piece of crap

theed

Registered
don't know how many other people are really utilizing X Server. I'd probably do better to gripe in another forum for server admins, but hey, I like you guys. So here's the scoop.

X Server comes with several admin utilities, all of which work over TCP/IP. This allows you to configure a server as easily headless and remotely as in the same room. That's good. What's bad is that their utilities totally blow.

Check that, the monitoring utilities are sweet, they let you see a bunch of stuff, and they smooth the curves just to make it pretty.

The controlling utilities don't have any idea how big the OS really is. I have tried in a couple of scenarios (NFS Resharing and now Authenicating against Active Directory) and all I get is errors and non-compliance from the workgroup manager.

So if anyone gets X Server, you'll probably be editing NetInfo or using the SharePoints shareware utility to set up your sharepoints as the workgroup manager is about as stable as a one legged table. For those of you interested in getting server to do sharing, look into SharePoints to see if it does what you want before dropping cash on X Server.

I have been Using Mac OS X Server wince version 1.0 (Feb99) and the administration of it has been getting more consumerlike and less professional with every iteration. Hopefully something will actually mature in the near future. The X Server hardware is sweeeeeeet. The services are pretty solid. The administration of them is just a complete minefield. Good luck for those who plan on following my path. :)
 
Hmmm, thanks for the info. I guess we just got lucky. We just started using Mac OS X server software a few months back and love it. Our 22 year old newly appointed IT guy who we pulled off prepress production had never set up a server in his life. After installing Mac OS X server 10.2.4 we had IMAP and LDAP servers running and had sharing points beween 12 PCs and 3 macs in less than an hour. I guess it's quite intuitive if this is the first time using server software. We haven't done much with it just have Filemaker Server, ODBC, POSTGRE and SQL servers running on it. We are playing around with the Quicktime Streaming server which is a joy to use but haven't really got into the inner workings of everything OS X server is capable of. Of course we wish we had an X Serve to run it on but it works flawlessly on our DP 500 PM.
 
yeah, I think the real problems show up in larger networks where X Server isn't in charge and instead needs to be a peer server or subservient to other services. I have ~6000 accounts listed on an external LDAP server. Workgroup Manager totolly chokes on it.
 
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