Of servers and religion.

[Ambush_Bug]

Disclaimer: I really do like the place I work. I really do. But there are days where the overwhelming Mac-centricity drives me up the ****ing wall.

OK, situation report. We have a file server. It's a cute little PowerMac 300-ish jobbie, completely tricked out with bad-ass SCSI cards and lots and lots of drive space. Well, it starting acting 'funky' and losing drives. This is bad, as my company is a multimedia company, and losing our server data would put us under, but quick.

So, I was the first guy that realized that little server (Flo is its name, btw) needed to be replaced, quick. There wasn't any way I could reliably back it up to tape while still keeping the normal rotation going, either, and putting it on CD would take WEEKS.

So, I got to planning out a new server. After some experimentation with a couple of NT 4 boxen sitting around in the office, I figured out how to get NT to reliably share out volumes to our Mac clients, completely preserving all resource and data forks of each files. (This is good, btw)

With a little mucking about, I spec'ed out a file-server with what could only be called a 'metric assload' of drive space. IDE RAID 5, big honking drives, little cooling needed, and best of all, I could make it practically bulletproof. All things factored in, I would have ended up with a RAID 5 array of about 250 GB or so, completely redundant and reliable.u Total cost, right around two grand, copy of 2000 Server included.

Know what happened? Soon as I mentioned NT and file server in the same sentence, the religion kicked in. "NO NO NO! WE MUST HAVE A MAC SERVER! MUST MUST MUST!" End result: we now have an Mac OS X server with just 120 GB of RAID storage (and it's RAID 0, not 5... SOFTWARE RAID, even), complete with Apple's half-assed implementation of file permissions.

Cost? Three thousand dollars.

The funny part? Flo was our print server too, and this brand-spanking new OS X server can't do that job, either. None of our Macs can print to it. Every PC can print to it just fine. See anything wrong with this?

The sad part? Thanks to the half-assed permissions structure that OS X uses (owner/single group/everyone), it's really difficult to get the file system set up in such a way that I can make everyone accountable for every little thing they do. Difficult? Hell, I meant impossible.

Folks, this is why being religion-ist about one's OS is a BAD thing. I coulda saved my company a thousand bucks or more, had something more reliable and easier to manage, and something that would have guaranteed our data to be safe barring anything but a direct meteor strike on the building.

But noooooooooo....

(I really do like Macs, folks... they make the lives of our art department much easier. But DAMN, there is no way in hell I'll ever consider a Mac up to the heavy-duty task of fileserving as much data as we throw around)

[Spinning Hat]

I agree, Bug... Unix/Linux/NT/and even Solaris systems are much better suited to act as file and print servers. The permissions structure, as well as being able to communicate cross platform is vital if things are to flow smoothly.

[Ambush_Bug]

Yeah, but the thing that really pisses me off is that I coulda saved 'em money by using NT/2K, and they went for the 'correct' platform instead of the one that woulda saved 'em some cash. Hell, I even had a demonstration up and running of how all of it WORKED, and damn well.

[Spinning Hat]

Been there myself, man. The First Cable Internet Job I had, they wanted me to setup a network in the offices.. and every reccomendation I had, was shot down, then they brought someone else in on the job and did EXACTLY what I had proposed, but it cost them three times more than what it would have cost them had I done it.... Makes no sense to me, but leave it to the idiots in the big corner offices to waste resources and not objectively look at the info in front of their dim eyeballs.