We bought an xserve at work to serve as a quicktime streaming server and webhost for academic applications. This was not exactly by choice. Given my druthers, we’d have gotten a linux box. But a variety of issues caused us to go with the xserve for at least the next year, and the task of admining it has fallen on me. It’s been worlds less than pleasant. Somehow Apple in its infinite wisdom decided to compile php against mysql libraries from a different version of mysql then what they decided to install on the box. They also decided to NOT compile PHP with the GD libs, meaning out of the box an xserve, a ~$6k server product, is incapable of authenticating against mysql and incapable of image manipulation using php. What did they think people intended to serve on the box, static web pages? This is just so….. bush league. (If you’re not up to speed on such things – a whole host of very popular web apps – gallery, Coppermine Gallery, Drupal, phpmyadmin, Mambo, WordPress, Moodle…oh screw it, basically any good php-based app requires one or usually both of these in order to function). The mysql stuff is relatively easy to work around, but the GD libs one is huge and is going to require that I rebuild apache and php from source, no easy task and a huge time sink. Long term unix admins are thinking at this point ‘quit yer whining, I’ve rebuilt apache from source on a 286 with 128k of ram!,’ but the point is, we bought a mac, so-called kings of user experience and ease of use, in part because we needed to be up and running quick and we hoped non-admin types would be able to help run it. This box has been anything but so far. I won’t even get into how trying to tie the box to the college’s active directory servers were causing it to lock up (details here if you’re really interested), or how Apple’s VNC client, Remote Desktop, is a buggy piece of junk, or how their GUI server management tools are schizo (change some settings using only the gui! Others, back to the httpd.conf – what’s the point! If it’s going to be in two places and it’s not logical in what lives where, it’s actually harder to have a GUI! I’m better of putting webmin on the thing and training the non-admin admins to use that). I love my TiBook (and my ibook before it) but man, I would never advise someone to buy an xserve based on my experiences with this one. For a couple of grand I could have had a red hat-based 1u dell server which I would have had up and running within about 3-4 days of installing it in the rack, whereas I am still beating on this xserve after a couple of weeks. Lesson learned, I guess. I’d say something positive, like, well, the hardware is really nice, which it is until you compare the process of installing an xserve in the racks vs a Dell box. Apple has some ways to go with their servers is my 2 cents takeaway from this experience.