[News] Apple starts to kill off its server functionality

[StyM]

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/45480-a...-functionality

The Fruity Cargo cult Apple is finally giving up on its server based flavours of OS X.

In the days when Apple was a computer company rather than a maker of overpriced toys, it used to make over-priced rack servers. Apple?s networking had a reputation for being about as reliable as the London to Brighton train, and soon people were starting to ignore Apple?s server offerings as if they were a rabid dog.

Jobs? Mob pulled the hardware but ran a unique flavour of OS X for that equipment with extra, server friendly features. For years there has been the occasional change in cost or distribution method, but it has still been with us.

In a recent post to its knowledge base, Apple states that almost all of the services not necessary for the management of networked Macs and other iDevices are being deprecated. These services will be hidden for new installs and dropped in the future.

Apple writes that "those depending on them should consider alternatives, including hosted services".

Well, at least Apple has worked out what it is good at, and it never was particularly good at networking, or software which could tell the time.

[drmrlordx]

That makes almost no sense. OS X is at least loosely based on FreeBSD. How much work did they have to do to gut networking functionality? It seems like it would be cheaper/easier just to leave it in there?

[Kai Robinson]

I'm an admin for 100+ Apple Servers, mostly all Mac Mini's - there's zero reason for them to remove the functionality, they could absolutely just leave it in. Removing mail, yeah that's fine, no one should be running their own mail server these days, DHCP & DNS? That's what modern routers are for...however, pulling the contacts, calendars, VPN services along with network home folders - that's unacceptable.