On 30 okt 2011, at 15:40, LuKreme <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 29 Oct 2011, at 16:40 , Jerry LeVan wrote:
>>> Is there a mailing list for OS X Server, especially one focusing on home 
>>> servers? I‚m giving Lion Server another go because I want to setup portable 
>>> home directories for my LAN,but I‚d feel more comfortable if I had a 
>>> mailing list to lean on.

I didn't know this list were client only? On the other hand I havn't thought 
much about it but 'admin' stuff does in my world involve server stuff and in 
line with this list Mac topic involve OS X Server administration on any level, 
home or enterprise. Bit let's discuss it from a client perspective and fly 
under the radar here ;)

One can very well use OS X Server for home server stuff and using networked ~/ 
is one of them. Now I've not used Lion Server but have been using Leopard 10.5 
Server for LAN stuff at my home. One thing that is of benefit is the relation 
to OS X client. Remote Desktop is usable, the client part on an OS X Server 
might save you a machine and you have a central adminstation point for shares, 
networked installation, LAN managing etcetera that is supposed to be made for 
the task at hand when OS X client machines is on board the ship.

I used to use the OS X Server 10.5 as a gateway/router and I had my LAN at the 
other side of a VPN tunnel. Living in Stockholm (Sweden) equals fast internet 
access regardless wire or air and I could keep much stuff away from my MacBook 
like my iTunes directory and other things. I used shared directories and since 
I am both the admin and the user and there is no one else on my private network 
I had no problem doing stuff that would be impossible at more typical networks.

I could control that only one iTunes.app were started at a time and used one 
iTunes directory for all Mac's, local or remote by sharing this one and only 
library and replaced the hard linked originals with symlinks. When opening any 
iTunes.app the symlinks would get trigged to hook up with the file server and 
mount the filesystem stored there and find the directory, and everything apart 
from bandwidth would be as if it were a local iTunes Library.

The problem with concurent write's from two or more running iTunes.app on the 
same shared Library were solved by simply not open more than one iTunes.app at 
a time. One could secure this a bit by scripting something doing a check before 
going and get ready for use but as I said I'm alone here and never do stuff I 
shouldn't at this level of easyness.

So I streamed my music and as I mentioned before, as I usually have bandwidth 
enough. So I streamed my video's as well. Podcast subscriptions could punish 
the bandwidth by going back and forth over the line and it certaintly could jam 
both the computer an the line so I solved this by not subscribe. Have you ever 
heard of such a sympathetic user? A dream come true imo ;) The limitations were 
no sacrifications on my part and were bandwidth where leaving the higher 
transparent levels of speed and caused my set up unusable I easily switched to 
some (small) local directories intended for this kind of situation. Some tunes 
as a reserve and sometimes some local stuff stored before going on a trip were 
VPN were of no good for me.

A bit to be careful about but really, who use two iTunes apps at the same time 
and feel it is nessesary to do so? Anyway, I'm really isn't that parallellised 
that I can isolate two songs playing at the same time and enjoy them both as if 
they were only one at a time. It makes me think of if the brain is many cores 
or what? At least it is one big bad boy in cpu land and it crush any silicon 
competitors lika they were insects hit by an H-bomb.

I'm thinking if I could be happy with this why couldn't you? You migth have a 
family using your computers or something else or living in an area were going 
together in the comunity and get the best internet solution one could get is 
thought of as doing comunism, leaving you with unregulated rip offs support and 
resulting in poor internet as if 100 mbps fiber were something exotic very high 
tech and expensive. Or anything else making this impossible?

But you just mention LAN, no remote use, so I think you could do much of the 
same regardless internet options. I didn't use networked ~/ since I had only 
need for the largest dirs to be of my client machines and use one big array of 
disk's to hold it and share it.

It seems as if Apple gave up on the Server side of things. The hardware is 
obviously crippled by Xserve's end of life and software doesn't look good these 
days. Securiy on OS X client never been as tight as we have today but the 
Server didn't get this attention and is heading the wrong way. It is a proof of 
market forces making difference imo. Many use OS X client and it gets Apple's 
attention and the opposite is true for the Server OS. That is not what I see as 
a Jobs way of doing things but I'm aware of that this has been done during his 
leader ship. If one have a product one should see to it as if it were important 
imo.

Today we have iCloud doing sync of the user directoris I belive. However, 
having multiple copies is disk space inefficient and for those having lot's of 
bytes stored a central repository instead of multiple copies is the only way 
for a working solution.

// John Stalberg

>>  has some drawbacks iof its own, or I can try to juggle the syncing of 
>> multiple machines which is not really doable.

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