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Forget Windows: SMBs should try Snow Leopard Server

Posted on 4 Feb 2010 at 14:50

Steve Cassidy says it's time to ignore Microsoft's licensing mess and bet your business on Snow Leopard Server

DNS in Snow Leopard is controlled via the Server Admin utility. Server Preferences, Server Admin and Workgroup Manager live under three icons – by default in the dock at the bottom of the screen – but it isn’t immediately apparent how the decision was made to divide up functions between them. Server Preferences relates to the machine you’re sitting at, while Server Management is about any (Apple) server the OS can see on the LAN, but there are things one might want to do across a pool of servers – like a one-click control to turn file sharing on and off – which are, in my mind, in the wrong place.

The excellent LogMeIn web-based remote control service is so blasé about cross-platform connections that you scarcely need to look at the machine you’re connecting with

But only slightly wrong. Apart from separately installing the utilities to a Mac workstation, you can also connect using Apple Screen Sharing and work just as if you were on a VNC. If you’re in the odd position of being a PC person obliged by circumstances to manage an Apple server, then I should mention that the excellent LogMeIn web-based remote control service is so blasé about cross-platform connections that you scarcely need to look at the machine you’re connecting with. It can all become incredibly confusing if you do as Apple suggests and plug a PC USB keyboard into your Mac mini to type on. Then you run a LogMeIn session to a Windows host, flip back to an OS X host and the Windows command key tracks the Apple key.

It’s becoming commonplace for PC pros to wax lyrical about Apple’s hardware, complain about its prices, then remark that you don’t need to put up with OS X to get the Apple advantage. I think that Snow Leopard Server might well reverse this. Sidestepping the jungle you need to negotiate to web-host under Windows, or the shifting sands of relationships with Cloud providers, used to be impossible unless you had 500 or more users and a healthy e-commerce business. Throwing this kind of mature platform into the fray could easily change a lot of minds, in businesses both big and small.

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