Apple Computers in the Enterprise Environment: Almost There Part 2.

My original thought when I started Almost There Part 1 was to write down what I was thinking while dealing with Apple in the Enterprise Environment. I always thought I would be able to look back and see if Apple improved on things I felt the need to comment about. After the MacWorld 2008 keynote I felt the need to deviate a bit from the Enterprise focus and take a look at Apple's Mac lineup.

MacBook is a good all around notebook. I think the 1280x800 resolution is too low for my needs. I'm used to 1400xSOEMTHING on my 14" Dell Latitude.

Stepping up to the MacBook Pro gets you a choice of 15" or 17" versions. I've seen the 17" version, and I write it off as luggable not portable or notebook. My experience is that people who think they want a laptop this big release that after buying the thing and lugging it around on a trip or two that they really wanted the smaller one.

The latest Apple notebook, the MacBook Air is impressive, but to me it seems to be the companion to a more powerful desktop computer. With no optical drive you won't be using it to watch movies on the plane unless you buy your movies from iTunes or convert your DVDs, or obtain your movies some other way. Even still, transferring these files from one computer to another it limited by the lack of wired Ethernet.

Overall Apple's line of laptops feels complete. Entry level, mainstream, desktop replacement, and the ultra hot (though I'm not sure why) ultra portable are covered. Like many others, I think there is a hole in Apple's desktop line.

The MacMini is a great Small Form Factor computer. I use two of these at work as a Mac test environment, and would consider replacing my own work desktop with one if I could pack some more memory into one. I use virtual machines all the time at work on a less powerful processor, but 2GB of memory just isn't enough. As a standard office desktop or the Mac you buy to transition from PC to Mac the MacMini is great.

The iMac is a nice powerful machine and is what I'm considering as my next computer. It's slick, it's fast, it's powerful. It would replace my huge CRT with a slick LCD, and it would do everything I want to do and then some today. The one thing that gets me down here is the inability to upgrade the video card as the iMac is an all in one computer.

To get the ability to upgrade video cards down the road, I'd have to go with a Mac Pro. Without a doubt these are powerful machines.Apple has abandoned the Core 2 Duo processors and gone Xeon. I'm not sure I need that much power.

What I'm really looking for is an enthusiast computer. Something between the iMac and the Mac Pro. Room for two hard drives, a good amount of memory, and the option of changing out PCI-E cards supported by Apple. It's a very "PC" mind set, but it's what I want.

Apple Computers in the Enterprise Environment: Almost There Part 1.

Recently I've become more and more involved with the operation of Apple Computers running OS X (10.4, Tiger) in our corporate environment. While working with these computers, I am often impressed and disappointed on how well they work with and fit into corporate IT. Impressed because many things that one would expect to be complicated pretty much just work out of the box with no hassle. Integration with various directory services (including Microsoft Active Directory) is a great example. Then, just when Apple has knocked my socks off, I run into something simple that is over complicated.

Setting up shared printers is a prime example of something that should be simple, but isn't. So far I have discovered three different ways to configure and setup printers on an OS X Server. The CUPS interface at http://localhost:631, Server Admin, and the Print & Fax panel under System Preferences. If this was an Apple only environment my impression is that any one of these tools would get the job done, however in a mixed environment where the goal is to get Macs, Windows, and Linux machines printing to the printers hosted by the OS X server the process is not at all straightforward.

Before I started working with OS X I knew that there was UNIX under the hood. When it came to printing I knew that OS X used CUPS. What I didn't expect was how poorly Apple had gone about pulling this all together. All I wanted to do was to setup printers on the OS X server and have them share out to other OS X and Linux computers.

After much trial and error I discovered that the way to get printers working the way I expected was to first use the CUPS web interface to configure the printer basics. Neither Server Admin or the Print & Fax panel exposed the option for a HP JetDirect print server, yet it was right there under the CUPS web interface. I also discovered that OS X was using the information entered in the description field as the "shared name" of the printer, not the name of the printer. I ended up setting both name and description to the same string to avoid confusion. While the CUPS interface let me configure the HP JetDirect option, it didn't have the full driver listing. To get a full driver listing I had to leave the CUPS web interface after selecting a generic HP driver. I went into the Printer & Fax panel under System Preferences in order to select the specific HP Printer Definition and specify installed options (Memory, Duplexer, extra trays, etc.). Once all this was set, it was into Server Admin to start up the print service.

After getting printing figured out, I didn't get back around to doing more under OS X for a bit. The next not quite there moment was dealing with the Apple XRAID we have attached to one of our Apple XServes. Our XRAID is an early generation XRAID, and four of five years ago I was a bit skeptical about it, but since then hot-plug SATA drives have become the norm in SAN configurations and looking back I see that Apple was ahead of the curve in SAN technology with the introduction of the XRAID. Apple's RAID Admin tool is nice, clean, and useful, however I discovered a major flaw. If for some reason you happen to have a printer (or any other device) configured to use the same static IP address as your XRAID's management interface, the RAID Admin tool will sit and spin endlessly trying to connect and manage the XRAID. I would expect to get a timeout error, or something along the lines of "Device is responding to pings but RAID management is not available." All I got however was a spinner that just kept on spinning. After diagnosing and correcting the IP address conflict that was created by another tech things started working as expected.

The last almost there moment I have also involves the XRAID. We recently purchased seven more drive modules to fill up the XRAID. When the drive modules were inserted into the XRAID they all flashed an orange warning light. Close inspection of the box of one of the drive modules has a small sticker indicating a minimum firmware version was needed to recognize the drives. A quick check of RAID Admin showed that we needed to update the XRAID's firmware. We have located and downloaded the firmware update but haven't yet updated the update. The update has minimal documentation. We assume that the update will cause us to loose connectivity to the XRAID, and thus the data stored there will be unavailable for a short time. While our shop knows that updates of this magnitude should be scheduled for a proper maintenance window, other shops may not be so tech savvy and may miss this detail.

I would love to go on and hit on some of the things Apple has got right (I love Apple Remote Desktop!) but in the interest of getting this blog rolling I'm going to save that (and more) for a future post. :)