Special Report: BANG - 2/24/99 For those of you who don't know what BANG is, it is the Bay Area NeXT Group. Every month, BANGers (?) get together to meet with important people who can feed them with answers, solutions, demos, and more. This month focused squarely on MacOS X Server and the future of MacOS X Server/MacOS X. The following is a collection of the reports we have received so far. Note: If you're wondering, unless we get rich real fast, we won't even actually have the pleasure of attending and directly reporting from a BANG meeting. So, we rely on others to submit information, notes, or opinions to create our reports. This report is currently pieced together from the collective submissions of three people. The presentation was delivered mainly by Ernie Prabhakar, the product manager for MacOS X Server. His presentation included both slides, and then a demonstration of MacOS X Server. And after the demo, the attendees got a talk from Rohit Khare on XML (a great Tweak List candidate!). We haven't really received any notes from this section of the presentation, but we are working to add some information about this section of the meeting, however. We have broken down the information into sensible bits below by relevant topic. If you should have any additional information, please e-mail us. Main Page Info   MacOS X   MacOS X Server   WO   YB   Carbon   Complete Listing News Archive    Recent    1999    1998 Featured Content    Special Reports    Articles    The Tweak List    XGolf    Links Xclave Info    Advertise with us    About the Xclave    Contact us    Open Letter to     Readers

  

MacOS X Server notes

 

General notes February was still said to be the release date for MacOS X Server. It was noted, however, that following that statement and a couple of follow-up questions, the air of cynicism could be cut with a knife. MacOS X Server will live on. Future versions will move to the MacOS X (Client) kernel, and peripheral support will come in line with that of MacOS X. However, the two OSes will be targeted much differently: MacOS X at home users, and MacOS X Server at professional and developers. A new release of MacOS X Server should hit the shelves around the time MacOS X (Client) is released. There is no "plan" to release a workstation version. The development cycle of MacOS X Server had no resources assigned, and no aim toward, creating a special version of MacOS X Server. This doesn't preclude people from using it as such, but it is not the intended use of this operating system.

 

What won't be there In the disconcerting category go USB, FireWire, and serial ports. It seems as though Apple has merely hacked MacOS X Server to support the USB Keyboard and Mouse which ship with the Yosemite (Blue-and-White) PowerMac G3's. Those two devices will likely be the extent to which USB is supported. FireWire is just a flat no. No support, no functionality, no nothing. Serial ports will also be unsupported, but all contributing to this report all note specifically that serial support may be possible eventually from some adventurous hacker. The reason given: MacOS X Server is a network server, and adding the functionality of these standard to MacOS X Server is contradictory to the focus of the software, which is the pure network environment. Note: Many developers, however, are unhappy about the inability to use FireWire with MacOS X Server. Many would like to have FireWire as an input option for video to be streamed with the QuickTime Streaming Server.

 

BlueBox The BlueBox demoed was running MacOS 8.5, and will have the ability to install future versions of the MacOS without any special consideration. The BlueBox is also at the will of the processor. You can only switch from the BlueBox on "GetNextEvent". Basically, you can only get out of the BlueBox when the processor isn't chugging away too hard. You can force quit the BlueBox, but the normal caveats apply.

 

Apache The included version of Apache is 1.3.4, not 1.3.3. Upon installing MacOS X Server, you will be guided through the setup of Apache. This should prove helpful for those not particularly versed in basic Apache. However, advanced Apache tweaking will still have to be done by hand, and will remain very UNIXy for a while. A bright spot, though, was the mention that future versions of Apache should compile on MacOS X Server with little or no work.

 

Security After you install MacOS X Server, most network UNIX-based services will be disabled, including telnet, rlogin, and ftp. Why? Well, the server will be most secure if you have to consciously start these processes. Otherwise, if the software was installed with all of these services activated, you might open up holes you normally would not.

 

NetBooting NetBooting will be supported by all translucent Macs, which currently means only iMacs and the new Blue-and-White G3's. Future versions of all PowerMacs and probably PowerBooks should be NetBootable. We won't go into detailing how NetBooting works here (that's for later this week), but we will note some potential problems: The speed of NetBooting will depend almost entirely on your network topology (the design and implementation of your network) You will probably need to use 100Base-T Ethernet, or 1000Base-T for those who can afford it Speed will be different for every environment. Unless the entire NetBooting cabling is on a separate network from other network traffic, bandwidth will be contested by any other network traffic. Depending on traffic, this could be an issue

 

Java MacOS X Server will ship with JDK 1.1.6 compatibility. No word on when support for Java 1.2 (Java 2) will make its way to MacOS X Server. A reader note: When I asked "What should we be writing apps in, Java?", the response was: "Write in Java if you can, but clearly not everyone can." Another note: Many of the included little apps seem to be in Java -- the Setup Assistant, the Calculator. This noticeably increases the application load time, however. The use of Java in MacOS X Server is both for the obvious buzzword factor, but also to show that Apple is Java-friendly, both to pure Java devs as well as YellowBox devs who would like to use Java.This is one of the goals for Apple after all - to attract new developers to the Macintosh platform regardless of that Macintosh computer's operating system. In fact, the Java applications which ship with MacOS X Server are not Java, but YellowBox apps written in Java.

 

YellowBox Apple is indeed sold on the power and wonder of YellowBox, but they don't know quite how to push the technology to developers. From the way this has been passed on to us, this is not a "Mac developers will run if we mention YellowBox" quandary, but instead a "we need to figure out how to fit it into our product line" quandary. No date was mentioned on when YellowBox will be released.

 

File Systems & File Sharing MacOS X Server will support: NFS AFP UFS (default/native filesystem for MacOS X Server) HFS HFS+ No one reporting in specifically mentioned either AudioCD or DVD formats. However, that is no need to raise the "oh my God, Apple didn't say it, and I will now be forced to slit my wrists and go use NT" flag. If you reason it out, at least ISO-9000 will be supported because the mere existence of a program like OmniCD is telling.

 

Development Tools MacOS X Server will include gcc, gcc+, Project Builder, and WebObjects development tools. Past that, no specific references. Many other additions like perl are likely if not guaranteed. Java, C, C++, and Objective-C will be the main programming languages for MacOS X Server.

 

MacOS X notes

 

General notes MacOS X should be out by the end of the year. MacOS X will not actually be a dumbed-down version of MacOS X Server. The two operating systems will be developed at the same time but with different feature sets. The sets will be very similar, but will each have differing goals aimed at their intended audience. Apple is focusing very clearly on making MacOS X an intuitive and powerful home user operating system. The HI team working on the MacOS X project are not copying the MacOS X Server UI, but instead are creating a new UI which will completely blow us all away.

 

What won't be there A basic install of MacOS X will not have any of the usual UNIX tools. There will be no command-line interface to speak of, and there will be little or no access to UNIX utilities. Inclusion of any specific UNIX utilities may end up being part of an advanced installation of MacOS X. But it's early, and there's no need to speculate on the installation process.

 

AppleShare IP notes

 

General notes It would seem that Apple will soon have a two-headed server solution for a small while AppleShare IP and MacOS X Server share the server spotlight. ASIP will not be replaced immediately by MacOS X Server. MacOS X Server will be positioned as a wide-scale, scalable solution, and ASIP will be the lower-end solution for small workgroups. In time, the two products will merge into one, and ASIP will essentially die. That, however, won't happen for a while, and not until MacOS X Server has feature parity and performance parity (or better) with AppleShare IP.

 

This report was last updated on March 3, 1999

 

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