Mac OS X - the perfect sysadmin workstation
If you work as a sysadmin you are most likely using a Windows or *NIX machine as your workstation. I feel sorry for those of you who has to use Windows, *NIX people are slightly better off. However, in my opinion the perfect system administrator workstation is Mac OS X. Why you may ask?
As a Solaris sysadmin I use a couple of tools daily
- a terminal program
- a browser
- a mail client
Those are the programs that have a graphical window on my screen. The rest of the tools I use are usually command line based so they all run in a terminal.
Well, why do I believe OS X is the ultimate sysadmin workstation? Because it has all of these and much much more. OS X even comes with a X11 server bundled so I can ssh into a server and run the display on my laptop, works perfect with everything I’ve tried. Firefox/Safari works just perfectly and Mail.app is probably one of the best mail programs ever invented (simple but fast - what else do you need?).
On top of that you get a real UNIX in the base so all of the standard tools that you are used to have are there or can easily be installed. This makes your OS X laptop the perfect coding tool while you are on the run. In Leopard you have DTrace and ZFS (read-write needs a beta package) in OS X as well and then you feel really at home.
There are even some tools that exists for OS X that doesn’t exist for Linux, CheckPoints SecureClient would be one example. I simply can’t understand why CheckPoint don’t provide SecuRemote/SecureClient for all major platforms but that is their decision.
Another bonus is that OS X looks good, but this a matter of taste. Most applications have an excellent UI, e.g iTunes. You have virtual desktops (or Spaces as they are called). You need to run Java programs - oh, they work just fine (JDK6 is not available yet but this is mostly a concern for developers).
But the best part is that it simply works. Since Apple designs the hardware and the OS you won’t ever have driver problems. You will spend more time working instead of fighting with the operating system to keep it running. Have you ever seen an OS X laptop wake up from sleep mode? It takes 2 seconds and then it is ready to start serving you.
Sure, this sounds like a Apple fan boy article and I give you that. I’m biased. There are problems with OS X. You just will have less of them running OS X than with other operating systems.
In my world the perfect desktop operating system is OS X and the perfect server operating system is Solaris. From now on this blog will cover that world view so you will start to see OS X related sysadmin material here as well :-).
Do you need system administration assistance? If you like what you are reading please consider subscribing to the RSS feed. If you have feedback or if you find the article useful please leave a comment below.
I agree that the combination of Apple’s own hardware and OS makes for machines that “just work”. That’s their chief advantage, as I see it, but I use ‘em all day and night, and they pretty much live up to the hype. They get the job done and don’t take up my time with installs, updates, reboots, driver downloads, etc.
“Mail.app is probably one of the best mail programs ever invented (simple but fast - what else do you need?).”
Not for me, not for years now, but then again I use Mail with several lists, and have thousands of email messages in it at a time.
My MacBook Pro, which I admit I use for different work [multimedia authoring, mostly], takes substantially longer to wake from sleep — and about 40% of the time, I have to close the lid again, re-open it, and wait 5-15 seconds for it to finish going to sleep, so I can wake it and wait about 5 more seconds for the screensaver security prompt.
I had the same problems with my MacBook Pro with waking from sleep, but only in Tiger. With Leopard, it does take 1-2 seconds as advertised, which is absolutely great.
…but the Checkpoint SecureClient isn’t available for Leopard yet. Hurry guys !
1-2 seconds? That’s long. Mine is awake before you can even get the screen all the way up.
I completely agree with you, OS X is the perfect OS environment for troubleshooting. A Macbook (which I use) is powerful enough to run major bandwidth tests with iperf loads, and use different tools for network analysis. I used to have 3 or 4 computers running at the same time with many windows and apps open, now (getting ready to move to Leopard) I have a Tiger Macbook with Expose, that lets me look at all of my windows/apps open and multitask efficiently.
The beautiful OS X desktop belies the power under the covers in the core. I’m an Apple “fan boy” as well. I do like some of what Windows has, but my desktop of choice is OS X. I like clicking on menus and having the whole menu show up quickly instead of an hour glass like some “other” operating systems.
moonie, I’ve heard that people have had problems with Mail.app but personally I never had any problems. I also have thousands of emails in my folders but never encountered much of problems.
But sure, Mail.app is not flawless but no other GUI-based mail client comes close. I was a pine user for many many years and Mail.app was the client that finally got me to switch.
Marc, I wasn’t aware that CheckPoint hasn’t released a client yet. I really hope they do it quickly because I’m dependent on it quite often.
Mike Rupertus, I think the most appealing aspect for me is that I have really user friendly GUI on top of a real UNIX. A perfect match for me.
Sure, Ubuntu has taken the Linux desktop many steps forward on the userfriendlyness scale but my personal opinion is that they still have many steps to go before they reach OS X.
For those you who want a faster sleep/wake, I suggest you set the hibernate mode to 0. The default setting (3) writes the RAM state to disk. This is a bit safer and uses less juice during sleep, but requires a few seconds to sleep and wake. Setting the mode to 0 will skip the write to disk and use a bit more juice to keep RAM up during sleep. The upside is that it makes sleep and wake almost instantaneous.
sudo pmset hibernatemode 0
Yesterday I tried to install Solaris svn_70b on my notebook and stay impressed how good it performs - I think it may be win-win combination - same systems on both server and desktop(notebook) side.
daeltar, OpenSolaris has made much progress as well on the desktop side and one of the main attractions for desktop use is actually ZFS IMHO. ZFS with snapshots is actually really really useful on a normal desktop machines, a bit like time machine but only better (I wish Apple would base their next time machine implementation on ZFS).
Personally I find the feature I miss most in using OS X for admining Unix/Linux is the X11 middle click function - Command + C/V seems like a lot of hard work when your moving commands around between windows all the time (yes I know its in terminal.app, but it is not quite as good as X11 because you cant move from aqua apps to terminal/xterms seamlessly) - that said tabbed terminal windows is nice.
I’ve been a Solaris user and admin for some years and I think that Sun makes an excellent server OS and continues to innovate. However, using a Sun workstation was a frustrating experience and I switched to using Mac OS X right back in the 10.1 days and never looked back.
In addition to the great points that you make, there is more:
- Some of us have to deal with Windows servers and having an official, fast, Remote Desktop Connection client from Microsoft helps
- Access to virtually any application - true Word/Excel rather than just Open Office
- Virtual PC and, since early 2006, Virtualization via VMWare or Parallels that allow you to run a fast image of *NIX or Windows xxx to do your configuration testing
Once you are comfortable living in Mac OS X, particularly today with a certified UNIX OS, Mac OS X Server becomes a very interesting and rapidly maturing alternative to Solaris for some applications.
Karl, your comments has some excellent points.
I personally use CoRD for my remote desktop use. It is very lean and efficient.
In a previous job I worked a bit with OSX Server (Panther & Tiger) and it was not a very good product back then. It will be very interesting to see what Leopard has to offer there. I still believe that Solaris is the preferred server OS but nothing in this world is static.
[…] Bloggaren Nickus skriver om varf
This totally smacks of Apple fan-boyism, but that’s ok. Just to play the devil’s advocate… you can install cygwin on Windows and get all the *NIX CLI goodness (well, maybe not all, but plenty). If I’m stuck with a Windows system or dual-boot Windows and Linux, I always throw cygwin on the Windows box. And browser/email combos on Windows would be thunderbird and firefox.
Having said that, yeah, Linux is a bit more of a nuisance on the desktop than it rightly should be. I *still* have to fart around with wireless stuff, although to be fair, when I threw Mandriva 2008 on my HP tablet laptop, everything worked flawlessly. Yeah, I had to tinker a bit, but it was better than with 2007.1, better than Ubuntu (which wouldn’t even boot on this system), and was only a matter of a few hours. Now I have a fullbore tablet running Mandriva. Extremely cool stuff.
However, I do use OS X for my main desktop. Spaces is… ok. Mail.app is… utter crap as far as I’m concerned. What self-respecting sysadmin would use that bloated heap? Give me mutt any day. As for browsers… well, I do some web work so I keep Camino, Firefox, and Safari all handy.
Throw that all on a mac pro with 7GB RAM, vmware fusion, copious amounts of drive space (somewhere in the neighbourhood of 3TB I think, in total), and four monitors and yeah… this is a sysadmin’s dream. Terminals galore. Tabbed terminals? Finally they got something right in Leopard.
[…] mac os x - the perfect sysadmin workstation […]