Apple Discontinues macOS Server

[chucker23n1]

FWIW though? I don't think Apple ever really envisioned the Xserve as a true "Enterprise grade" server solution? I think it was more of a modern re-imagining of the "departmental server" like they once sold in the old days of Motorola CPUs and MacOS 7.x and 8.x?

It seemed to me like Apple thought it would be of interest in scientific fields or publishing houses, where one group might want their own workgroup server to share content around and runs their hosted application(s) from?

I think that's right. Schools, too.

 

[kingtj1971]

To whoever made the comment below?

Thinking of the server as separate from the desktop OS isn't just a "Microsoft thing". This has almost always been the case with Linux distributions too. They have a separate "server" edition.

It's not that it's impossible to take a desktop OS and configure it to work as a server. It has more to do with the assurance that the entire thing is configured, right from the initial installation, to be optimized for that use-case. For example? A server is often hit with many dozens of requests at one time to open or write various files. A desktop OS only has to deal with the user in front of the screen launching apps and editing files; not juggling a whole office full of people doing it. Server OS's often reserve far more memory for record locks and disk caching to handle this, and they may prioritize the background processes running over having a "snappy" desktop user interface for whoever is managing the system. They may even use a different filesystem for a server OS. (BSD Unix implements OpenZFS filesystem for things like TrueNAS/FreeNAS, for example. It's just a more robust file system when you need to reliably store large amounts of data for quick access.)

IMO, you really don't want a dedicated server to have a menu full of icons to launch desktop games and utilities anyway. (Microsoft did some of that but it doesn't make it a good idea.) With a whole server OS, you can ensure the default offerings are all server and system related tools.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Why is this a big deal? If the server software is built in now, where's the problem? Thinking of a server as something separate from a desktop OS is a Microsoft thing. Apple used to do it, probably because the paid software community expected it because of Microsoft, but it has never made sense. A desktop OS is a server OS if you configure it to be one. Many important tasks are already using a client-server model internally. Just look at how printing works. Apple uses the Common Unix Printing System for that. It is a print server out of the box. It can do anything else with a few clicks or an install from Homebrew. You don't need Apple to sell you a server OS or hardware, you just need a very small amount of competence and maybe a Google search to tell you how to do anything from file sharing to running a mail server or Open Directory.

 

[davemchine]

My small music related business used to run a Mac Pro 1,1 on Snow Leopard Server as the major file server. It was easily the most stable piece of hardware + OS that I have ever used. I set it up initially with the intention of just test running it, ended up getting the SMB server running and imported the list of users in like half an hour, actually deployed it right afterwards, never even needed to reboot once for the following 3 years or so. Mind you I got no IT background, just a business owner with some Macs experience. It got other server functions pre-cloud that were really handy, like the CardDAV and CalDAV servers, of course Time Machine, and your standard stuff like Apache / FTP etc. Granted many of these are "easy" to be done via commandline or some 3rd party app, but having everything in a single OS with a single pane of glass, with human-readable interface was really helpful. Not to mention being a server OS it cut the fat compared to a client OS, Snow Leopard client was already extremely stable, and the server variant made it even more so.

I really miss the days when Apple was visibly competent as a tech company. Nowdays we moved on to Synology for servers, and Ubiquiti for network appliances (mourning AirPort Extremes...)

My experience was similar to yours. Setup a server and it was rock solid for a long time. Now I’m lucky to get two weeks of uptime. Whatever Apple did to the OS it seems any app can take down the whole system now. Fortunately Apple entices us to upgrade with…emojis. Yah.

 

[davemchine]

It saddens me to think the Mac public is so uninformed that comments like this will fly by and nobody notices. Small Office? Competition from Synology? LOL. The OSX you're running on your MBA has the same UNIX (like) underpinnings as the highest end servers in the world. Go to a terminal and pull up man-pages and see all the references to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc. This is why they're dropping a "server" version, it's not needed and is silly it even or ever exists/existed. You have a full unix server at your fingertips, you just have to do it from a terminal, like it's meant to be. Apple has spent decades dabbling in crappy front-end tools to compete in the corporate world. The reality is they became a first class enterprise platform the day they introduced OSX, and has had this platform ever since. There downfall has been continuing to update the server hardware. For instance, I'm a big Apple fan, but manage a mixed Windows and Ubuntu (and some FreeBSD) environment. I could replace all my Ubuntu servers tomorrow with OSX, but I can't load it on anything but Apple hardware, which limits me greatly. The software will do it, the hardware just creates a barrier, particularly since everything these days is virtualized.

I don’t know that I would compare OSX to the Unix versions used on high end servers. While most Unix programs are available the stability of Apple OS leaves a lot to be desired. Programs routinely bring my computer to its knees and I am forced to reboot (even with access to command line). Whatever Apple did to its version of Unix made it inferior from a stability viewpoint.

 

[davemchine]

Makes sense. Apple doesn’t care about pro users. Just look at the dumbed down mobile OS we are stuck with.

It really is rediculous. Ever try word processing on an iPad? I’ll just wait till I’m home and can use a real computer.

 

[sir1963nz]

True. That´s why we still have a MP3,1 running Sierra with the suitable old Server.App.

Nice side effect is that while APFS remained "beta" on that macOS, you can use/make Time Machine backups from modern macOS clients on dedicated APFS volumes in Sierra. The server app also handles/shows them in the right way.
Hint for folks interested to go that route: The only thing that turns "sour" and reboots the machine from time to time is when a mix of HFS+ and APFS time machine accesses is attempted. We sorted everything out to only use APFS on destination volumes and it works seamlessly from Monterey clients... Hope it stays that way for a couple of months! ;-)

I will probably just do everything using Carbon Copy Cloner on Macs

 

[Chancha]

My experience was similar to yours. Setup a server and it was rock solid for a long time. Now I’m lucky to get two weeks of uptime. Whatever Apple did to the OS it seems any app can take down the whole system now. Fortunately Apple entices us to upgrade with…emojis. Yah.

Ever since they stopped releasing server OS standalone it has been down hill. I think the last was Lion Server, but even that version departed from Snow Leopard and apparently made ways to the AppStore version (on top of the greasy client Mountain Lion OS).

This was about the same time when iOS went from 6 to 7. Something must have fundamentally changed in Apple (people often jokingly accredited Scott Forstall for Apple's software excellence, but the timings of these seem to confirm that aspect)

 

[throAU]

Huh. I haven't thought about MacOS Server in a long time.

Remember when Apple actually made server hardware? Good times!

Maybe, but these days, servers are to be treated like cattle.
Apple make machines you treat like pets.

 

[Larsvonhier]

I will probably just do everything using Carbon Copy Cloner on Macs

Try partially/selectively restoring your work from a certain date in the past from a CCC backup... Then you´ll notice the difference between a (incremental) backup and a mere clone of your drive.

 

[RandomDSdevel]

Spoiler: Automatically propagated file permissions (Quote spoilered due to length)

This is a common use of a shared folder: You have a shared Mac and you want to create a folder where multiple users have full access to add, modify and delete files, whether they are multiple users logging in to the same Mac or connecting through File Sharing. Currently on MacOS, this happens:
1. User1 saves a file in the shared folder and logs out.
2. User2 logs in and can read the file that User1 created, but can’t save changes.
3. You open Get Info on the shared folder, configure the permissions and click “Apply permissions to enclosed items”.
4. The next time one user creates a new file, other users are still unable to modify it because the “Apply to enclosed items” button only applies to items that exist at the time it was clicked.

On MacOS Server, the file sharing interface has a checkbox to inherit permissions on folders. Desktop versions of Windows also support configuring permission inheritance on folders. MacOS has none of this. if everything in MacOS Server was available in MacOS, then MacOS should have a user interface for configuring permission inheritance on folders. I am not interested in command line trickery. If saying “use Terminal” is a valid excuse, then MacOS Server should never have existed at all.

-----My Dad once tried to have a similar setup involving multiple sharing groups between multiple users on the same Mac, but he was never quite able to get it to work due to non-Server (Mac) OS X's/macOS's limitations in this area as you describe.

Spoiler: Multi-Mac Home folder sharing (quote spoilered due to length)

I tried Server once but couldn’t achieve what I needed from it.

I have several Macs but I do the same work on all of them and am tired of having to install/update the same apps on each, migrate versions of my files, etc. I just wanted a way to log into any of my Macs and my home folder would be there - always the latest version. I thought macOS Server was capable of doing this (effectively it would store your home folder, apps and preferences and smartly download it all to the Mac you’re working on). Couldn’t get it working but would love this to be a thing.

At the minute I just keep my work stuff on an external drive but it’s not ideal because not all my work can be put on the drive. For example: MySQL databases which typically live in ~/Library/Application Support/ somewhere. You also can’t keep apps on it because like above, their supplementary files are stored in Library.

If anyone has a better idea, I’m listening. iCloud Drive is not suitable either. I tried once and despite it not being terribly big in total size, there were so many files that it actually broke my iCloud Drive and I was on the phone to Apple for weeks trying to resolve it. Syncing just stopped. Refused to work.

-----This would indeed be awesome. Another thing my Dad once tried was to have all of our family's Home folders stored on an external drive, but not even that worked reliably all the time; the attempt's long since been abandoned, and I've never tried it myself.

The App TinkerTool has a UI for setting up Permissions, ACLs and Inheritance that is very similar to the way the macOS Server app used to handle them and it has worked 100% as expected for me. Unfortunately it is a $17 3rd party purchase, but I find it combined with the built-in SMB file sharing makes a pretty decent file server.

-----That's nice to know. I wonder if there's some hidden OS functionality it uses under the hood or if it just implements a filesystem watchdog daemon and hooks permission-adjusting scripts or rules into it like you could hypothetically build yourself? (Bonus points if anyone can point at an open-source project that does this already.)

---

-----I wonder if anybody's tried to make a(n) (preferably open-source) spiritual successor to (Mac) OS X/macOS Server, particularly the more fully-featured iterations of days gone by. I never used Server myself, but having a GUI to configure all that kind of stuff has always sounded quite nice to me.

 

[indyandy]

This is a common use of a shared folder: You have a shared Mac and you want to create a folder where multiple users have full access to add, modify and delete files, whether they are multiple users logging in to the same Mac or connecting through File Sharing. Currently on MacOS, this happens:
1. User1 saves a file in the shared folder and logs out.
2. User2 logs in and can read the file that User1 created, but can’t save changes.
3. You open Get Info on the shared folder, configure the permissions and click “Apply permissions to enclosed items”.
4. The next time one user creates a new file, other users are still unable to modify it because the “Apply to enclosed items” button only applies to items that exist at the time it was clicked.

On MacOS Server, the file sharing interface has a checkbox to inherit permissions on folders. Desktop versions of Windows also support configuring permission inheritance on folders. MacOS has none of this. if everything in MacOS Server was available in MacOS, then MacOS should have a user interface for configuring permission inheritance on folders. I am not interested in command line trickery. If saying “use Terminal” is a valid excuse, then MacOS Server should never have existed at all.

With TinkerTool System (https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerToolSys7.html) you can set the ACL Permissions so all the files inherit the permissions of the parent folder. I use it on our MacMini fileserver.