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The quest for arcane records has taken me to Netcraft's table of web servers with the longest continuous time running, at uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.last.html. Hopefully, when you visit it, the current record-holder will have exceeded five years. Young sprog that Mac OS X is by comparison, it can't aspire to the top 50 just yet. However, BSD variants appear unrivalled when it comes to uptime, and OS X's innermost software consists of BSD running on a Mach kernel.

Air-traffic controllers in Southern California could be forgiven for wishing that their radio system - used to communicate between them on the ground and the hundreds of aircraft flying above - had been running on BSD or OS X Servers. For in September, according to reports in the LA Times and the New York Times, their relatively new Windows 2000 Advanced Server system shut itself down automatically. The end result of this could have been a catastrophe on a similar scale to that of 9/11, with five official near misses, and countless other close calls.

Amazingly, this cataclysmic server shutdown was claimed as resulting from a long-standing problem in Windows servers: they manage resources, such as memory, disk space and temporary files, incontinently. The workaround is to reboot them periodically, and savvy Windows sysadmins typically do this as a matter of routine every month. If they fail to do this, their servers will progressively

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slow down, choking on their own detritus. Eventually, after a tad under 50 days, they'll automatically shut down, even if they're managing one of the most safety-critical tasks in the world.

There was the inevitable element of human error, too, in that the sysadmin who should have performed reboots every 30 days failed to do so. There was also a bit of bad luck when backup systems, which should have automatically taken over the task, fell over because of a software problem. However, the bottom line was that the air-traffic control system in the US relied and continues to rely absolutely on a fundamentally flawed operating system.

In Europe, at least, Apple has hardly been pushing OS X Server as a popular product, and some have questioned its commercial viability on this side of the Atlantic. On the other side, though, OS X Server is establishing itself as one of the best all-rounders available. However, there has been considerable reluctance here to cast off AppleShare IP (ASIP) servers, and few if any system designers have viewed OS X Server as a serious alternative to Microsoft's portfolio. This confirms my old adage that the best computer products seldom sell well: a complete, highly robust, almost virus-free, easy-to-administer server suite that's cheap to buy, support and maintain, could never become popular.

OS X Server isn't perfect by any means. If you want to get a view of its current crop of warts, visit lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/macos-x-server and subscribe to Apple's mailing list for a while. If you want to scare yourself as to how comprehensive its features are, browse the manuals at www.apple.com/server/documentation, preferably when you're cut off by snowdrifts for a couple of weeks. It's an enormous step up from ASIP, but the world has changed since those innocent days, and you don't have to use all those acronymed features from the start. Kick off by simply providing file-sharing services, and then gradually offer more as you get your head around the rest.