Mac Servers In A Windows World?Mac Servers In A Windows World?

SEEING SPOTS

One major knock against the new operating system is that the built-in Radius service is promised to support only Apple Airport stations, though it's based on the open source FreeRadius. You may get other access points to connect, but this is a significant gaffe if Apple is serious about positioning Leopard for more than just Mac shops.

Owners of PowerPC-based servers hoping to ramp up their podcasting also will be disappointed. It seems Podcast Producer isn't universal; the server app is Intel-only because of Apple's decision to go with the hardware acceleration in the Quartz-Extreme video chipset offered on all Intel Macs.

And despite dead-simple installation, not everything was smooth. For instance, we tried to configure iCal on a quad Xeon box configured as a member server in a Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) Open Directory environment. We couldn't get iCal running without forcing a trusted bind back to our directory master. We also lost access to one of our test platforms when we "demoted" it from a standalone directory master to being a member server.

Still, on the whole, this is a substantial upgrade to Apple's server offering, and we recommend that shops running 10.4 investigate. We also think non-Apple SMEs should take a look, whether as a mail server, for collaboration, or to facilitate the creation and distribution of multimedia content. OS X 10.5 Leopard is $499 for 10 clients, and $999 unlimited.