

Apple Shitcans the Xserve - shawndumas
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/11/05/xserve

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frou_dh
Shitcan is a funny word and all, but this news has been on HN four times
already today!

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bigohms
No surprise here. Xserve is competitive/heavy/archaic to their impending cloud
service offerings.

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teilo
Is there anything that Xserve does that would be difficult to do on a Linux
box? Could they, perhaps, lend assistance to the netatalk project to assure
present and future compatibility with the AFP protocol? Same for Bonjour? And
the open-source HFS+ driver?

~~~
zdw
All of what you mention already exists - MDNS is quite common, Linux can
read/write HFS+, and netatalk supports the current versions of AFP.

OS X Server is basically a custom set of packages over OS X client that
provide the various server functionalities, and tweak the kernel for server
use.

What Linux and most other open source products lack is the smooth integration
of all those server bits - in most cases the biggest directory (LDAP)
integration by default. While you can do that integration on your own, it
takes much more effort.

~~~
teilo
Yes, I know it already exists. I run them all at my company. But these
projects are often playing catchup to the latest protocol changes. Thus my
question.

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gojomo
Gruber writes: _You don’t think Apple is filling that North Carolina data
center with Xserves, do you?_

What hardware and OS/distro _does_ Apple run in its large service-oriented
datacenters?

~~~
zdw
If I had to guess, software is probably a custom build of OS X that can run on
3rd party hardware, or the normal version and custom EFI firmware for the
hardware.

For hardware they probably buy off the shelf parts, although a custom design
ala Google's wouldn't surprise me.

