Although Mac OS X Server is a perfectly viable server as it stands, Apple is continuing to fine-tune it. By this fall, it expects to ship the final product in the form of a high-powered desktop and server duo, along the lines of the Windows NT Server and Workstation. Also similar to Microsoft's plans, Apple plans to meld the current Mac OS 8.x into the Mac OS X desktop.

For our testing, Apple equipped us with a new G3 machine with Mac OS X Server preinstalled. For clients, we were issued two iMacs to connect via a Fast Ethernet hub. Instead, we chose to hook up everything to our existing full-switched Fast Ethernet infrastructure.

Initial installation is easy; configuration assistants walk you through the basics. However, you may need to edit text files to tweak your server configuration. With our Unix and Apple server administration experience, we found both the initial setup and the advanced tweaking simple.

After walking through the basic installation assistants, we emerged with a server with one IP address, one AppleTalk interface, a few user accounts and a lot of services, including NetBoot, an Apache Web server, an Apple Filing Services server and a Macintosh Manager server.

A User Isn't Necessarily a User
Mac OS X Server provides a rather confusing system of two different repositories for storing three types of user profiles: Local server accounts, which are used for logging into the server itself, and Apple File Service accounts, which are used for logging into the file services from a client (chooser), and are stored in NetInfo. Macintosh Manager accounts, which are used to log into managed clients, reside in a separate database. Apple says it intends to put all these pieces into a common NetInfo repository in a future release.

Likewise, there is a variety of interfaces into the account databases. The server provides an interface to the NetInfo database (NetworkManager. app, an application that's run on the console of the server machine), the WebAdministrator for Apple File Services, and the Macintosh Manager application. Creating a user in one place doesn't necessarily give you an account in the other contexts. The same rules apply when you change passwords. For instance, the accounts we created during setup appeared directly in the NetInfo database, but not in the Macintosh Manager database. (The setup accounts are exactly the same as users created in the NetInfo interface, NetworkManager.app). Those accounts are allowed to log in at the server console and via Apple Filing Services.

Next, we created an account with the WebAdmin tool. This user, though created in the NetInfo database as well, is able to log in only through Apple Filing Services, not on the server console or from Macintosh Manager clients. This can be considered a feature because users of file and print services don't necessarily qualify for access to the server console. Additionally, we were able to use the NetworkManager.app application to give the user access to the server console--it was simply a matter of giving the user a default shell.