Re: [WinMac] Email Choices and Re: Hardware & software

Dan Frakes(Dan[at]InformINIT.com)
Tue, 23 Mar 1999 18:05:27 -0800

Many people are throwing around suggestions/criticisms of various
platforms and their appropriateness as "server" platforms. Unfortunately,
most of the posts on these issues have been blanket statements that fail
to consider the purposes for those servers. When you are considering a
server, you need to ask:

1) What will the server be used for? Email? Mailing lists? File server?
Web server?
2) What is the expected load on the server?
3) Who will be maintaining/administering it?
etc., etc.

If you are setting up a mail server for a small office (100 people or so)
EIMS running on an older PowerMac is going to be JUST as effective as a
top of the line UNIX or NT machine. If you are going to be setting up a
high traffic web server, there are VALID arguments to be made for UNIX,
Mac OS or NT, depending upon the services you intend to integrate with
the basic web server capabilities, the support staff available, etc. File
servers? Depends upon the clients accessing the file servers, the type
and degree of security desired, etc. etc. All of these factors are
mitigated by the $$$ you have to spend.

So for people to get into shouting matches about which
platform/OS/hardware is better is a bit silly unless we're talking about
a very specific application of that platform/OS/hardware.

On a different point, several people have expressed reservations about
the stability of the Mac OS as a server platform. I have found that for
the _most_ part (but not always -- don't anyone get defensive) such
assertions come from a) no experience; and b) bad experience. I've also
found that many of the people who support Mac and NT servers will go to
weeks of MSCE training classes to learn how to properly configure NT
machines, but have never been to a single training class, or ever done
any research, on how to best configure a Mac for a server environment.

To give an example, at my old job we had a PowerMac 6100 running Mac OS
8.5.1 that we used as a mailing list server. It was running Fog City
Software's LetterRip Pro, supporting approximately 80 mailing lists. The
various lists had anywhere from 20 to 6,000 members, with traffic from 2
or three messages per day to 150 messages per day. It was also running a
low-to-moderate traffic ftp server. It was fast, efficient, and crashed
once in 18 months. Why? Because it was properly configured. It had the
proper extensions and control panels, enough RAM, and was given a
thorough hard drive and hardware inspection before it started serving. We
had 10-15 Mac servers from an SE/30 running MacDNS to a G3/300, two UNIX
servers, and two NT servers. Most of the Mac servers had similar
performance histories to the 6100. The UNIX machines were rock-solid, as
expected. The NT machines required the vast majority of administration
time, and crashed the most (including the Exchange server, which proved
to be the most support-intensive machine we had ever had).

None of this is to sing the praises of any platform, or to put down
NT/Exchange. Exchange is a good high-traffic email server -- it just
requires a lot of attention. The point is that these blanket statements
that are being thrown around aren't contributing to solving people's
problems as much as careful analyses would.

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