Statement about Lion Server experience

Question

Hello all,
I don't expect anyone to answer here as nobody here answers to my questions at all which just increases my Apple frust I developed during the last weeks and months.
Let's say it's kind of experience report here:
Mid of last year I bought my first iMac which was shipped with Lion and a while later a Mac Mini Server with Lion Server. It was the first time I was using a Mac changing away from Windows (client and server) which until then was thinking there must be something better in the market place.
Somehow Lion client is kind of ok. Looking nice and software is doing what is expected but when it comes to the server I really obviously see the real face of the OS. Loveless copied together Open Source components hidden behind nice looking GUI and assistants which manage to corrupt the whole system so that nothing works anymore. Luckily I set up Time Machine backup as one of the first things and was able to fix the corrupted components by restoring parts of the configuration from it.
Apple says to use Profile Manager rather than MCX. Great stuff. I configured a user profile for a workstation. Unfortunately one user was not signed it to a computer and did not get the profile. If you are planing to have an environment where each computer and user had different settings and profiles I recommend continue using it. I'm using MCX as I can make sure settings are getting applied whenever. Tried to find out how to make sure profiles get applied and how long they are valid until they are timing out. Found nothing. No suprise anymore.
There is no good whatever documentation of the whole server OS available. Everything what is readable are things what you can guess already yourself. I read lots of articles people having same problems. Documentation part is really poor but mareting pages you can find tons of.
- Tried how to get a system 802.1x configuration working with this nice OpenRadius component by either using computer account or certifacate authentication. No help in this forum and no documentation which helps anywhere.
- Tried to change the servers IP address after DHCP, DNS,OD, Profile Manager was installed. Profiel Manager was left with corrupted apache config (Time Machine restore only helped). I was spending hours on how to get it fixed again. No documentation available what is involved what to do. Just checking logs to try to get some kind of clue what's the problem. Seems most of the stuff only works when using Microsoft AD and CA.
- Things only work with this Bonjour stuff. If you have different subnets somewhere this server is almost not usable or you can try your luck tampering around in some config files as the wizards do not help you there at all. So far I hate Bonjour, I'm an experienced guy I want to configure things myself and not only wait they show up automatically.
- If you want to get something done then just buy apple stuff like Airport base station (e.g. configure WLAN propperly). For sure I won't waste any more money on Apple hardware. When using other vendors hardware you get almost punished for it. Dare you!
About this Open Directory. It seems to have the development state of a NT 4.0 domain controller and not even that. If you touch a little part somewhere in the system it breaks apart immediately. Kerberos is a good candidate giving up right away.
I'm not a UNIX pro but I really had to learn using Terminal to recover from a mess the nice GUIs were creating. GUI not refreshing (close and open an application only helps) is already kind of normal to me.
Here are the anyway best applications on Mac OS X:
- Disc utility (really good tool. Amazing what it can do out of the box)
- Time Machine (helped me in two weeks four times to recover from a ususable system. One full recovery was also needed)
- Boot Camp (helps me to get finally Windows back on hardware I've payed far too much money for it).
For consumers which swallow everything a company is throwing in front of their feeds and belief in their marketing talks how good their products are go ahead here but when you are used to question things you won't get a lot of answers.
I'm not yet giving up but the boot sticks with Windows 7 and Windows Server are already on my desk waiting.
Cheers

Answer 1

Eduardo
At the moment there is very little for Lion Server. What little there is, is here:
http://www.apple.com/uk/support/lionserver/
and here:
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/lion_server_upgrading_migrating.pdf
The administration manuals take some time to become available which is usually the case when Apple release a new version of the Server Version. However most of what's there does not change that much and generally the 10.6 Administration Manuals will contain most of what will eventually become the 10.7 Administration Manuals. Again this has always been the case going back to at least 10.3 Server. Technologies introduced in 10.5 Server such as CalDAV, Wiki and Blog etc did not change that much in 10.6. Apple also moved away from Cyrus as one of the Mail MDAs to Dovecot. But again the locations of where these were stored did not change. Going back to CalDAV and CardDAV these now appear to be amalgamated into one store.
As ever with any version of the Server - regardless of platform or age - it's a good idea to have plenty of backups and to experiment first with a test/lab environment before rolling it out to a full production server.
HTH?
Tony