What is on Your Mind?

Neo, I used to admin a bunch of Windows and Novell servers at my old job. 80 servers, 10,000 PC windows clients, maybe 300 Macs. I did all the Mac work with one other guy and then did some PC work.

Now at my new job I have 30+ Xserves running 10.5.5 Server, and 6,700 Mac clients all in a pure open directory environment. I use a third party suite called Casper from Jamf Software.

I can tell you from my experience that package deployment is not only easy, it is way customizable and there are so many things I can do with it. Very very robust products. I can push out an application to all my clients with in a day if I really wanted to from my office. I can send them jobs to netboot and automatically reimage, from my office across the WAN.

Apple is lacking a few things here and there but really to be honest it is some of the best things I have worked with, when it works. I don't mean to say they don't work but I have definitely had my isues. 10.5.3 was a giant heap of dung and so was Work Group Manager 10.5.3 I wanted to thunder kick all my Mac servers at that point in time.

If you are going to run Web servers I would say Linux all the way, but if you want a file server, home directories, open directory, DHCP, or any other service you can run on a sever OS X Server isn't that bad.

My main comment from before was suppose to be, you can do everything from the command line or the GUI, you have a choice, which no Linux or Unix distro really has accomplished yet. Maybe Ubuntu has come close, but I can't compare the end user experience to that of a Mac.

I intalled TomCat, PHP 5 and MySQL on one of my servers through an installer package and it took all of 3 minutes to do so. Then configured it through the GUI. I just now need to brush up on my mysql command line abilities and I will be set.

Just saying is all.

Hey tlarkin!

Thanks for the great post.

When I talk about installing packages on "a remote server", I am talking about an environment where no GUI is possible. The server is only configured from a SSH connection.

I am not sure, and you are free to correct me, but I don't think OS X is the best choice for this type of "SSH-only command line remote admin" installations.

In your post, you conclude:

Are you saying that you can install and run these packages and configure completely from the command line without the GUI, via SSH, just like a Linux server?

Honestly, I only use OS X as a desktop and when I find a package like MAMP (LAMP for OS X) it seems to require a GUI click-and-install approach. Even the directions for install do not discuss any OS X "pure command line" linstallation approach.

Are you saying you can do 100% remote install, upgrade and configuration vis SSH? Yes or No? Thanks.

Here is a bit of follow-up:

Let's take MAMP for example. Here is a quote directly from the MAMP users guide:
As you can see, there is no direction for installing via the command line. The installation is a GUI drag-and-drop.

Please correct me if I am am wrong. Why does the MAMP install guides only discuss a GUI drag-and-drop installation?

I guess because it is all self contained and does not need access to /Library for some reason.

If you wanted to install it from the command line you would have to download the binary and compile it yourself, or use the mount and cp or mv commands to move it form the disk image to the /Applications folder.

If it was self contained though you can run it from anywhere, not just the /Applications folder.

If I recall, by default OS X 10.5 has PHP 5, MySQL and Apache installed by default. The only one I am iffy on is MySQL, not sure if it is installed by default.

So really you just need to edit your Apache config file to turn it on and point it to your web root folder which should be ~/sites or something like that (memory is drawing a blank atm and my macbook is in my laptop bag and I am being lazy....sorry)