11 Aug 2003 | Mike said...

I just froogled it, and came up with these results.

I always start with Froogle ;)

11 Aug 2003 | ajr said...

Check out PowerMax. They have some refurbs for pretty cheap. From what I have heard, they are a little difficult to set up.

11 Aug 2003 | scottmt said...

We have many many xserves in a rack. They are fairly easy to physically setup. With some use the OS X server tools become second nature shortcuts to many of the server features you can manually configure at the command prompt.

if you're webserving, its just Apache, and it works very well on an xserve... The machine is no slouch. I have no experience with serving mail off one, but again I dont see why it would be different than any other *nix server - depends on the implementation.

Remote management is also robust and you have several options, be it just SSH connection or Apple Remote Desktop, which is a really nice and stable app IMO.

you can still enable appeshare and do AFP mounts, NFS services etc etc etc.

11 Aug 2003 | Matt said...

What is wrong with your current set-up? Seems to me a switch to would be the about same thing, except you would be paying alot more for the hardware, as opposed to a less costly, generic Intel machine. Admittedly, I have never used XServe, and perhaps Apple makes administrative tasks more user-friendly, but I can't see switching unless you had particular gripe about the hardware it's running on. I guess it depends if you plan on taking advantage of Apple's software for things other than webserving...

11 Aug 2003 | JF said...

We're currently running on a shared server environment and and want to go with a dedicated box which we'd colocate. We're strongly considering the Xserve because Apple's GUI admin tools and remote admin tools are a big plus. Plus, I just to support Apple so I'm OK spending more for the hardware.

11 Aug 2003 | hp said...

I have used OS X Server for a long time now (includsing when it was called OS X Server 1.2) and have been very happy with it for both development as well as Web serving.

As for the current OS X Serve, I love it for just about everything save for mail serving due to a number of issues with the mail server being shipped with it. However, if you don't mind spending a bit extra you can always go with Stalker's CommunigatePro.

Obviously, Panther Server will pack many improvements so it may be worth wiaitng for a couple of months or so.

As for Xserve, I haver not used it extensively but so far my experience has been excellent.

Hope this helps.

11 Aug 2003 | Franois said...

The Xserve is an excellent machine and the remote tools make it a breeze to monitor. Just make sure you configure it with just what you need to serve and secure it properly (that means you do NOT want things such as AFP or NFS on!)

As mentionned, you can also do it the Nix way through SSH, and I recommend Webmin which will add a lot more convenience, plus the ability to administer many more things than what Apple ships (including several other mail servers).

Panther promises to improve the admin tools a lot.

[P.S.: your javascript code that checks the email address in the comment form still rejects the .info domain as invalid. I reported it months ago]

11 Aug 2003 | SU said...

[P.S.: your javascript code that checks the email address in the comment form still rejects the .info domain as invalid. I reported it months ago]

This is now fixed. Apologies.

12 Aug 2003 | Stefan Seiz said...

I got a real good deal on a refurbrished one from SmallDog.com. Works like a charme. Remote management of the Server Hardware is charming, however don't consider remote management sufficient to setup Apache in any more complex way. If you get one, get at least a ton or a ton and a half of memory.

I am just about to setup two more XServes and an XRaid here.

If i were you though - given you're not providing hosting to your clients - i'd not get ANY OWN hardware, and save me the trouble of having to deal with (and the script kiddies). Just get some professional virtual hosting deal and you're done. Maybe you can even get virtual hosting on an XServe with Digital Forest?!

Stefan

12 Aug 2003 | Stefan Seiz said...

Oh, forgot to mention, sorry. If you do decide to get an XServe and you want to do mail too, do yourself a BIG favour and buy CommuniGate Pro (50 user license ~500 US$) from Stalker.com. You'll never regret it and the ease of maintenance (webbased) and performance which comes with it.

12 Aug 2003 | stevenf said...

We switched to an Xserve and it has been absolutely wonderful. It is our web server, mail server, and FTP server primarily. It handles all of our secure ordering, etc.

The only problems we've had have been human related.

For example, someone at the colo facility bumped into the front of it somehow and ejected one of the hard drives (we have a 2-drive mirror RAID). Entirely our fault for not locking it. Anyway, it kept right on running and even sent us an email to let us know there was a problem with one of the drives.

We've since locked the drives into place and have heard nary a peep out of it. Uptime is 68 days as of this moment.

12 Aug 2003 | kageki said...

IMHO Xserves are overpriced as a network appliance. I don't think buying a server ever makes economic sense when you can lease one. For the same money you can get a dedicated server for 3 years and cover all the setup, maintainence & backup costs. And who knows what kind of pricing or technology will be availble at that point. Personally i'd much rather lease a new box at that point if i need it than have a 3 year old machine on my hands.

Where Xserves really shine is with OS X specific uses like a server farm for rendering, or streaming Quicktime (which isn't that big a deal with the open source darwin) or some other use i can't think of that needs OSX.

If i were you, I'd buy a G5 when they're available, and take an old mac you have now, install OS X server on it and colocate that. Again, you can colocate that for 3 years for the same price as an XServe.

12 Aug 2003 | JF said...

Problem with colocating a tower is the cost. We can colo a 1U unit for $159, but a Tower is more than twice that (it's a space thing, of course). Or, maybe I'm coloing with the wrong people. Suggestions?

17 Aug 2003 | CAm said...

I recently bought my own rackserver, a used Dell PowerEdge which is now running Debian Linux. I'm exploring the option of getting an Xserve to run alongside the Dell.

My reasons for wanting my own box are numerous. I own about 50 domains and of those domains, about 30 are actual web sites and the other 20 are sites in development or ideas for sites I want to develop in the future. Before having my own dedicated server I had to pay my hosting provider money each month for every domain I wanted to host, plus the setup fees and excess bandwidth fees for each site that became popular. I was reaching my badwidth quota every month and realized that I had simply outgrown the shared server hosting environment despite how generous and flexible the offer was.

It's taking me weeks but I've got half of my domains now moved over to the dedicated server and I also am consolidating all of the domains to one registrar to make domain management easier.

I was fortunate enough to get a deal to share half a rack at a colocation facility in Manhattan, where my Dell PowerEdge now resides. The best part about this is the bandwidth is unlimited but capped at 1Mb/second -- usually enough to support several high-traffic web sites.

Compared to my previous shared server hosting environment, I was limited to 2 GB/month of bandwidth and was paying about $60/total per month plus $20/month for a second unrelated hosting environment at a different location plus the excess bandwidth fees (which can get ridiculous).

My share of the half-rack is about $100/month and gets cheaper as we recruit more people to put their boxes in the rack. A half-rack is 24U, logistically supporting up to 24 1U boxes. But more realistically, considering you need space in the rack for a switch and other equipment, you can fir 12-18 1U boxes.

17 Aug 2003 | kageki said...

CAm:
$100 for a piece of a rack is a pretty sweet deal. if i needed a bunch of different servers or was in the hosting biz, that'd be the way to go.

JF:
Two reputable hosts that will colocate or lease for $99/month or less are www.velocityserver.com and www.rackshack.net. You might want to find someplace closer to chicago than those guys, but it's a start.

21 Aug 2003 | Joel Mueller said...

There are some issues with the Xserve, but if you're not going to run higher traffic sites on it, it should be able to handle what you need.

1) The mail server is terrible. Go with another product. WebSTAR's mail server was TERRIBLE but it seems they finally fixed their problems with the SMTP server going deaf. I've heard Communigate is great.

2) If the power goes off on the Xserve when it's running, it's preferences get corrupted for virtual hosts and Apache won't load. There seem to be many issues like this with small corruption. Directions for fixing this if it happens is available at the Host Solutions forum:

http://www.hostsolutions.com/forum/index.php?board=8

3) MySQL / Sendmail are hard to install and activate. I had to do it manually instead of running Apple's GUI interfaces.

4) I had MacUpdate on an Xserve for about a month. It handled the traffic fairly well, but once in a while MySQL would hog the CPU and connections would build up. InsideMacGames.com runs their site on an Xserve currently.

5) When hosting virtual hosts with the built-in FTP server, it is not secure by default. Any user can login to their own FTP account, and move up directories of other user's files. They can't edit or delete them, but just view them. Still, this is REALLY bad. Tenon's iTools package (www.tenon.com) has a more secure FTP server setup by default.

6) Consider colocating with Host Solutions - there's a datacenter in Michigan (about 3 hours from Chicago) as well as one in San Jose. ;)

http://www.hostsolutions.com/

-Joel Mueller
www.macupdate.com
[email protected]

21 Aug 2003 | Cam said...

My server is actually located in one of the racks leased by the Open-Bandwidth Project, which was put together and run by a former coworker of mine. They are currently looking for more people who want to colocate their servers with them. The prices are absolutely amazing.

16 Jan 2004 | Lanzarote Flge said...

Thanks!