OS X Lion Server Purchase for Home Network

[dmax35]

Looking for some guidance or suggestions to configure the best server solution for my home Apple patch.

We are a recent conversion from pc's to an all Mac's household consisting of 2 Mac Pro's, 3 Macbook Pros, 1 iMac and 4 ipads.

All Mac's are running lion and really have no need to upgrade to Mt.Lion at this time because everything works across the board just fine.

Currently the Mac Pros' have an SSD drive for OS and apps, and 6TB of internal enterprise drive storage (Raid1) with an external GTech G-Raid for backups. The Macbooks also have an external GTech Gdrive-mini for backups with a secondary backup to iCloud. The iPads backup to iCloud.

My goal is to avoid killing our wifi bandwidth doing backups etc, so that's the one reason I have not ventured into a NAS solution. Rather than having to manually admin each system updates etc I figured it might be worth looking into OS X server.

Where can I purchase Mac OS X server for lion? and will this be the best server solution for my home systems? I plan on using my Mac Pro as the server.

Thanks.

 

[talmy]

Lion (and Lion Server) are no longer sold. However Lion Server was $49.99 but Mountain Lion + Server totals $39.98, so it costs less to upgrade to Mountain Lion and use its Server package.

I've been using Snow Leopard Server on a mini, using multiple services for about 3 years. My trials and tribulations are here but the newer server versions are easier to manage (however they do have fewer features). I need to update the page, I've got 7TB of external disks attached to my mini now.

I can't tell from you post what you want a server for, other than to manage system updates (which I feel is too much of a PITA to do with OS X Server!). Most people use home servers as a fancy NAS, but you state you don't want NAS functionality.

 

[dmax35]

Wow.... Great write up, that is par in what I'm wanting to do. Thank you!

Lion (and Lion Server) are no longer sold. However Lion Server was $49.99 but Mountain Lion + Server totals $39.98, so it costs less to upgrade to Mountain Lion and use its Server package.

I've been using Snow Leopard Server on a mini, using multiple services for about 3 years. My trials and tribulations are here but the newer server versions are easier to manage (however they do have fewer features). I need to update the page, I've got 7TB of external disks attached to my mini now.

I can't tell from you post what you want a server for, other than to manage system updates (which I feel is too much of a PITA to do with OS X Server!). Most people use home servers as a fancy NAS, but you state you don't want NAS functionality.

 

[dmax35]

You hit the nail on the head about wanting to manage system updates across multiple systems. What you recommend?

Thank You.

I can't tell from you post what you want a server for, other than to manage system updates (which I feel is too much of a PITA to do with OS X Server!). Most people use home servers as a fancy NAS, but you state you don't want NAS functionality.

 

[960design]

Just chiming in here.
I use Western Digital 4TB My Book Live Duo (NAS) for my system backups. My iPads (3), iPhones(2), MacBookPros(2) automatically backup without any effort from me.

It has tons of great features that you may or may not want, but thought I'd save you the 'trouble' of setting up a home server when it sounds like you don't really need one. Why give yourself the extra work? Backups should be seemless and it doesn't get any easier than this. REALLY, it cannot get easier.

Walk in the house, mac detects network, begins backup when computer is idling ( or occassionally when I'm reading/working; just have to click the little spinny thingy at the top to delay backup a bit ).

It also functions as a webdav server for you iPads. And expandable to another USB drive, just connect it and MORE STORAGE!!

 

[chrfr]

You hit the nail on the head about wanting to manage system updates across multiple systems. What you recommend?

Thank You.

OS X Server isn't really what you want to use here, and managing software updates with it won't save you any time vs. just letting the client machines update themselves automatically. There are several enterprise-level packages that do what you want, but again, not worth the time and/or money to set up in your environment.
For backups, if you're concerned about network bandwidth, you need external drives on each machine.

 

[talmy]

While download bandwidth is saved, the bandwidth isn't that large except for OS version updates, and those can always be downloaded from the Apple site and applied manually. The reason to have a server manage the updates is so that an IT department can vet the update for possible conflicts with "mission critical" applications before releasing the update to the systems.

BTW, for Mac App Store applications, you can download on one system and just copy the application bundle from /Applications to the other systems. These applications are self-contained and don't install themselves all over the system. You can also copy the bundles to your server for archiving in case they no longer are available from Apple but you need to install them again.

 

[dmax35]

That's what I'm currently doing now. If we need to share any files, dropbox comes into play.

For backups, if you're concerned about network bandwidth, you need external drives on each machine.