What is the point in MacOS Server?

Whilst working with a Start-up, I was initially pleased to see they had a fleet that was 70% Apple, I’m an Apple and Linux user myself, so this was refreshing for sure!

Then the reality sets in; an Apple estate is actually a pain in the neck when you’re used to managing Windows estates.

It pains me to say it, I love Apple hardware and have loved it for a couple of decades, but for a an ecosystem that is based around Apple maintaining control, I found that delivering what the client wanted was very difficult (freely admit I may have been part of the problem here…).

There are ways to control multiple Apple devices, absolutely, and they really play well with something like Jamf.

The irritation that sets in because you don’t have the tools that you’re used to in Windows environments soon starts to creep in. That’s not to say you can’t do things differently, or even better, but sometimes I’d chew an arm off to have access to a tool-set that works every day, day in, day out.

Don’t give up, find a solution!

I booked some time with an Apple Small Business Executive, another thing I love about Apple is that you have almost instant access to dedicated resources that treat you like you’re the most important customer on their books. We discussed some tools that might make things better. I finished up buying a MacMini and MacOS Server with the aim of taking central control of the Apple assets, managing them through MacOS Server.

The MacMini turned up a couple of days later and MacOS Server was soon installed. Installed is a bit of an over stretch of the word, it’s a single App, it works like pretty much all other apps written for an Apple OS, you drag it to your Applications Folder and it’s pretty much ready to go. So what does it actually do?

Not a damn lot!

The one thing it seems to do very well is caching of system updates, other Mac’s then seem to find the server without much effort from the side of the server admin, and updates flow via the server. This greatly reduces the load on the WAN link and is actually pretty awesome, considering it does that ‘almost’ out of the box.

Then there are all these other services that you might want. Like a Wiki server (check, I definitely want it), a DNS server, DHCP, OpenLDAP, NetInstall, VPN, the list goes on.

And to all of these awesome services, well, Apple is retiring them.

Technically they are still available in the current release, but they are kind of hidden. I say hidden, you find them via the menu bar, you turn a ‘service’ on and it appears in the left menu of Services.

However, Apple has advised that these services are for the great service trashcan in the sky and will not make it to the next MacOS Server release.

Essentially, any of these services you enable today are either going to hold you back in the future (you’re going to be limited on how many updates you can apply to that system in the future, that’s right, a server, the part of your infrastructure that you are going to want to keep as up to date as possible) or they are going to still require replacing with another system in the future.

Now in Apples defence, they are providing documentation on other services that you can migrate to, but this moves away from the Apple world.

MacOS Server costs £20’ish via the App Store. Is it worth it? Probably. As long as all you want is a profile and update caching server. Anything else, it just ain’t going to cut it.