I'm into my third week at my new job - systems/network admin for MCN, a small ISP in northern California.
We have a pretty heterogeneous server environment: BSD, Linux, a few Windows boxes, and OS X Server. Almost all of my Unix experience has been with Solaris, Linux and to a lesser extent, AIX - all of which are much more like System V UNIX than BSD.
I haven't spent any time at all prior to this job with OS X Server, and I know that it's really BSD underneath. So I figured that the first thing to do would be to find a good book on the subject. Wrong!
As of today, there appears to be a single published book dealing with OS X Server: Mac OS X Server Administrator's Guide by Andrew Russell & John Welch. Trouble is, this particular book was published in 2000, which means that it was written in 1999, which means it's 5 years old, and applies to a much earlier version of OS X Server than 10.3.5.
Amazon shows a second book, Mac OS X Server 10.3 Panther by Schoun Regan, but it will not be published until November.
Why is there such a dearth of information on this operating system? If you subscribe to the Mac OS X Server mailing list hosted at apple.com, you'll quickly find out that there are a lot of people using OS X Server.
I'm frankly shocked that O'Reilly doesn't have a book out on the topic.
So there isn't much printed matter for OS X Server. Any pointers for documentation online?
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Read More Entries by Roger Weeks.
O'Reilly's Mac OS X Server book
Hi there,
O'Reilly will be publishing a Mac OS X Server book. The lead author on the book is Michael Bartosh, and he's enlisted some help from a couple friends. The book, tentatively titled Managing & Using Mac OS X Server is nearing a completed draft. Watch my blog for updates on this and other O'Reilly Mac titles.
Chuck
Online Server Guide(s)
Theilgaard Consulting, Søren Theilgaard sells a PDF manual for $20 that shows how to admin an OS X server. Fairly basic stuff, but it helped me find info for a few things I couldn't find anywhere else. You can download a sample chapter to get an idea before buying.
The AFP548 site ( the name refers to Apple File Protocol port 548) has many articles about setting up and maintaining both Jaguar and Panther Mac OS X servers.
Another good resource is Mac OS X Labs. While not specifically OS X Server related, they do show how to setup and maintain Macs in an educational lab environment, things like maintaining servers and clients.
Stumbling start
From observation, OS X Server 10.0, 10.1 and 10.2 worked well, but just had enough flaws, omissions, inflexibilities and weaknesses in their toolsets that most commercial operations who needed that much power got better results by running Unix products (often open source) on OS X Client. MUCH better bang for the buck. (Apple's initial set of email administration tools were a joke.) If you didn't specifically need the administrative tools geared specifically to Mac networks, X Client was enough to run with (and a helluva lot more powerful than OS 9). Server 10.3 solved, or at least improved, many of these situations, and, from what I've heard is a MUCH better administrative system. But once folks learned how to work the command line and do without the bells and whistles, going back was a less enticing option. That's a shame, because Apple's admin tools look pretty sharp by now.
On the way
Take a look at the comments of this thread:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5453