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Is Lion Server Better than SL Server?

For those of you who have upgraded your Snow Leopard servers to Lion, is it worth it? I have upgraded my desktop Macs and my MBP to Lion, but I hesitate to upgrade the Mac mini servers I am running for my company because of upgrade glitch and performance concerns.


My impression of Lion at this point is that most of the enhancements are in the user controls and the desktop, which are not important issues for the servers. The Macs that I upgraded from SL to Lion actually appear to be more sluggish than before, particularly when it comes to network performance and streaming, so I have yet to see an actual performance advantage beyond the changes to the user interface.


I also have a lot of web applications using MySQL and I have read reports of the Lion upgrade breaking MySQL from the SL install. I am also running the Apache security module (ModSecurity), which was difficult to install in SL. I had to manually build the library files for it so I'm assuming the Lion upgrade will break the ModSecurity installation.


Are my fears unfounded or will an upgrade to Lion from SL be problematic on a production server that's run for a business?

Posted on Jul 22, 2011 6:13 PM

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Posted on Jul 22, 2011 9:33 PM

Let me start by saying, I love lion. The os is amazing. That being said, Lion server is the biggest pos server software I've ever seen. Functionality is limited to the point of no control. Not only do you lose the individualized control of several core features, upgrading a pervious SL server breaks every core feature you'd need. It ruined my OD, disabled every virtual host website, discarded the VPN settings and believe or not, was set to sleep after 15 min by default. I don't know what apple was thinking, but DO NOT Upgrade. Apple needs to release several bug fixes before this product is usable.

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Jul 22, 2011 9:33 PM in response to capaho

Let me start by saying, I love lion. The os is amazing. That being said, Lion server is the biggest pos server software I've ever seen. Functionality is limited to the point of no control. Not only do you lose the individualized control of several core features, upgrading a pervious SL server breaks every core feature you'd need. It ruined my OD, disabled every virtual host website, discarded the VPN settings and believe or not, was set to sleep after 15 min by default. I don't know what apple was thinking, but DO NOT Upgrade. Apple needs to release several bug fixes before this product is usable.

Jul 22, 2011 10:11 PM in response to lephino

That's good to know, and why I decided to wait. My Mac mini servers are stable running SL so I don't know what the justification would be for upgrading to Lion. It doesn't support MySQL and I suspect it will break the apps I had to manually build library files for, so it seems to me that upgrading to Lion would risk a considerable amount of downtime and grief for no measurable gain.

Jul 26, 2011 10:40 PM in response to capaho

I wouldn't upgrade it yet on a production machine since there are issues. Actually it's probably best to do it on a test Server and manually migrating the data over to Lion Server at this point.


It's true a lot of things break if you just do a plain upgrade over SLS since I upgraded my own test server to evaluate Lion Server before upgrading my clients SLS. I have yet seen any upgrades from any server version work well. Something normally doesn't transfer well and best to manually migrate stuff.


If you do a clean install of Lion and then Install Lion Server most things work pretty well so far such as mail and apache, and OD.


NOTE: However you need to have at least at DNS already running on another machine so when Lion Server does a reverse name lookup, It'll find the name of the server. If you at any point change the name of the Lion Server, you'll break links and other stuff don't seem to work well. This also solves the issue of nstat_lookup_entr failed.


So far I've Installed Pure-FTPd Manager 1.8 and Recompiled pure-ftpd 1.0.32 and works fine in 10.7 Server. I'll give more of a progress report over the next few days as I configure the server to my liking.


Even though Apple removed mysql in Lion Server. You can install mysql from mysql.com, Mac OS 10.6 64bit version. As for what I read online, it should work. I've installed it but haven't tested it yet, but should have it running in the next day and see how it runs.

Jul 26, 2011 10:51 PM in response to capaho

For Lion, I finished to migrat Snow leopard to Lion for 4 Macs, iMac x2 , MacBookPro, Macmin without any problems. It's great.


For Lion server, I tried to snow leopard server to lion server twice after taking a bootable backup.

Everytime the migration failed in a process of constracting the services ... I think it's OD.


But after clean instalation of snow leopard server to external HD, the maigration was done succesfully and easly without any problems. But there are some homeworks, for example, to set each config files, httpd.conf, ., to install Tomcat and MySQL at least.


Eventually I decided to use Snow leopard server for the time being.


Tac

Jul 27, 2011 10:55 AM in response to capaho

I would also like to chime in to the DON'T "UPGRADE" sentiment expressed here.


I am running snow leopard server on an xServe and paid for the Lion Server upgrade thinking it would be slick. It does look slick, but it doesn't work.


None of my accounts or configurations where successfully migrated, so it basically knocks me off line with regards to my mail and web services as well as any other applications the server was using (authentication, file sharing, etc).


So, at this point, unless you are able to take a bunch of time and configure the Lion server from scratch, forget it.


Also, you need to go to Apple's support website and download the Lion Server Tools seperately as they don't come with the software.


Time will tell if this is a good release or a bad one, but for existing Server customers, this is trouble.

Jul 27, 2011 10:32 PM in response to Eric Shepherd

>Agreed; there seems to be no support for configuring web services, which is especially bad since none of my web sites are working anymore since upgrading.


There was a story on cnet yesterday about the latest security stats, and web applications are being attacked on an average of once every two minutes. That's every web app on your server getting attacked every two minutes. The best protection for web attacks is ModSecurity, but there is absolutely no support for it in OS X. I installed it manually on my Snow Leopard servers after a successful injection attack against the wiki on one of the web sites. I had to build the library files for it manually, so I'm sure it will be broken if I "upgrade" my SL servers to Lion.


It looks like Apple is trying to make server software that's really easy to use so consumers can set up their own servers in their home, but the Internet is a very dangerous place to run a server if you don't know what you're doing. It's even a greater risk if your server is on the same LAN as your home network. The server admin tools for Lion, from what I can tell, are just too simplistic to be taken seriously for business or professional use, and I fear that Lion Servers will just increase the number of zombies available for botnet service. I have to ask, what were they thinking?

Jul 28, 2011 12:36 AM in response to capaho

capaho wrote:


It looks like Apple is trying to make server software that's really easy to use so consumers can set up their own servers in their home, but the Internet is a very dangerous place to run a server if you don't know what you're doing. It's even a greater risk if your server is on the same LAN as your home network. The server admin tools for Lion, from what I can tell, are just too simplistic to be taken seriously for business or professional use, and I fear that Lion Servers will just increase the number of zombies available for botnet service. I have to ask, what were they thinking?


Good write!

Is Lion Server Better than SL Server?

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