Hello, I’m a web craftsman with a passion for the modern web. I build web applications and play with social services and communities.
Apple is known for it’s well working hardware+software packages which work from the first moment on without any trouble and just a fast and painless configuration.
Unfortunately that is not the case with Leopard Server. New software is always buggy. So I decided to wait with the Leopard Server installation until Apple released 10.5.1. However, even 10.5.1 makes a lot of problems on a fresh installed system.
System: Apple XServe 2x 3GHz Intel Xeon
The system ran 10.4.10 before very smoothly. Instead of upgrading 10.4 to 10.5 I decided to do a clean install to avoid problems with the upgrade process.
First problem: the remote installation didn’t work, so I had to plug a screen, keyboard & mouse in the server room. Ok not a big deal and the rest of the setup worked well. Approximately one hour later and 10.5.0 was running.
The first thing I did was updating to 10.5.1 with the downloaded update package from the apple page. No problems with the update.
Now I wanted to configure the server as a gateway. Needed services: DHCP, NAT, Firewall.
While NAT and Firewall worked fine after starting, DHCP didn’t work at all. The Service indicator was green but still the clients didn’t get any IP-Addresses. The DHCP log showed:
can’t open /etc/bootptab (I do still get this message)
subnets: create failed, Invalid/missing ‘net_address’ property
the missing net_address property caused the issue.
Adding it by hand to /etc/bootpd.plist fixed the problem.
So at least the clients do get IP addresses and can access the internet.
A lot faster and stable is AFP now. One thing that works…wow! But the possibility to use a server disk as time machine destination didn’t want to work either. Have no fix for this so far.
Next problem: Software Update Server. Doesn’t work at all. There are a lot of people in the Apple Forums with the same issue. No fix so far.
Sometimes the Workgroup Manager tells me that my username/passwort are wrong. 5 minutes later it works. Again, don’t know what’s the problem there and can’t reproduce the error. Seems to be totally random!
Eventually I gave the Software Update Server up and stopped the service. It’s not really needed anyway and will get fixed with 10.5.2 hopefully.
So I went over to some more important services: iCal Server and Wiki Server.
Both refuse to work! The Web server crashes with the following message:
Nov 18 21:22:48 peacechild com.apple.wikid[6526]: Removing stale pidfile /var/run/wikid.pid
Nov 18 21:22:48 peacechild com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.wikid[6526]): Exited with exit code: 1
Nov 18 21:22:48 peacechild com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.wikid): Throttling respawn: Will start in 9 seconds
No fix so far. Didn’t spend a lot of time in this because I was sick of the whole Leopard Server.
Bugs over bugs. Some are ok and normal. But that many major problems with a freshly installed system???
Apple what did you do there? This is not a business-ready product!
