Thursday, August 09, 2007

An Apple Nerd’s Wish List

(WARNING: this is a slight departure from the usual fare here at Ransom Note Typography HQ. Mondo Geekiness ahead. And I have a lot to say about that geekiness. But fear not, I have a simply hilarious story about Ellis showing up nekkid to her day care the other morning all queued up for tomorrow. It’ll all be back to my definition of “normal” tomorrow.) So without further ado:

My job description at work is a little odd. I work for a graphic design firm. I do some art type things, but I also do all the very nerdly things in the studio, such as the care and feeding of all our Macs and one lone XP box. And all other I.T. needs as well. Our internet connection. The servers. The studio’s site. Sadly and tragically, also the phone system which I loathe, because it confuzzles me in the extreme. (Trunk line? BR-1? Hunt Groups? huh?) Though occasionally, I have a small victory on the phone system.

I know I sound completely full of myself when I say that though there is a possibility I’ve forgotten more about Macs than most people will ever know, I also end up tending to think of myself as a semi-professional I.T. weenie in the area of “traditional” I.T. stuff, i.e., databases, routers and stuff like perl and shell scripting. Everything I know is from the school of hard knocks and late nights and Google. In those areas (especially with shell scripting) I know enough to be dangerous, basically. And I tend to get myself backed into intractable corners, like the time I completely hosed the perl installation on one of my servers, trying to get Movable Type 3.3 to work. (never did succeed either. le sigh. Stupid DB::DBI thing. Gak.)

Anyway, I do know a fair amount. The “traditional” big iron type of stuff is relatively new to me and I don’t have quite as much experience with that sort of thing, but I at least speak the language. What I’m trying to say is this: I at least partially know of what I speak when I rip out the following rant.

Attention Apple ~~Computer~~, Inc.:

Decide please, if you are going to enter the so-called enterprise market FOR REAL or not. Stop yanking us professionals around and either offer “real” Enterprise products or not. I know, I can read the reviews and can fondle an iPhone and I know the iPhone is a joy and they need to be issued to everyone at birth and who doesn’t have an iPod these days? I had an orange iPod Shuffle for breakfast this morning; that’s how ubiquitous they are. But we geeks who keep the graphic designers in fonts and network connections? We need some lovin’, too.

Don’t get me wrong, the Xserve is a wonderful product and a sweet piece of kit. We have two in the studio and I love them very much and do not like to be away from them for extended periods of time and it’s possibly a bit unhealthy. (You are being served by one right now.) And the Xserve RAID is beefy and wonderful and reasonably priced, if a bit on the slow side from what I gather. Remote Desktop 3? Über-ginchy and I use it to manage all the Macs here in the studio as well as the Macs down in L.A. And Open Directory? Oh, man, that is some wonderful stuff. And the Lights Out Management (LOM) business is perfectly cromulent on the new Xserves. And I’m sure people using their XServes and Xserve RAIDs with XSan are probably OK with it. And you can shove some very large HDs in the 1U Xserve and achieve a decent density of storage. All very fine things.

BUT!

Where is my 2U Xserve? Where is my 4U über-box? Why do I have to buy a separate (and very large) 3U Xserve RAID in order to get hardware RAID mojo? Why can’t you build a 4U with some of the RAID goodness offered as an option? Why isn’t a copy of Remote Desktop offered at deep discount when you buy an Xserve? I run my Xserves completely headless via the Admin Tools and the CLI (one racked in a cushy data center), but Remote Desktop is dang helpful in a pinch. And if you are buying an Xserve, isn’t it safe to assume there are other Macs that need managing and Remote Desktop is a delight. And why is the documentation for Enterprise level functionality so abysmal, atrocious and abominable? I’d never set up a mail server before we racked the Xserve in the data center. Sure, it was easy to punch the right buttons and get it up and running, but I had zero understanding of how those buttons I was mashing really worked. And that strikes me as a bit dangerous, frankly. Did I try and glean some meaning out of the provided documentation before I hit “go”? Yep. Did it help? Not so much. I finally only let the mail process start up after I really understood what was happening on the box. You know how I got LOM working when we got our newest box? Not from the documentation Apple provided in the box or via the web. Not by a long shot. Pure guess work. Plug and Play with It Until It Works is the calling card there. And Open Directory and all its loveliness? Ended up buying a couple of books. And getting .htaccess stuff to work in apache running multiple virtual domains is tricky, because of the slightly odd way OS X Server sets up apache. Is that sort of info in the provided docs? Surely you jest, my young padawan!

And that’s OK, I guess. Not everyone who buys an Xserve is going to need to understand exactly how postfix works before they run it. Some people will be totally fine just punching the proper buttons in the “pretty OK” GUI tool, Server Admin. Apple’s engineering guys are pretty smart and the box won’t become a spam relay, merely by turning on mail service, after all. So these are complicated products and concepts, I get that. Enterprise “stuff,” especially in a mixed platform environment is a tricky business. People go to technical schools, seminars, conferences, have rafts of O’Reilly books, etc. to learn about how to deal with it all. So I’m not asking for someone to hold my hand while I set up an Open Directory Slave in separate physical locations across the IntarWebs. This is not sync’ing iTunes and an iPod. But something other than “check with your Network Administrator before you modify this setting” would be nice. Dude, I am the Network Admin and I’m consulting the documentation because I need answers. If I had a Network Admin Nerd under my spell, I wouldn’t need to be perusing the docs, my friend.

So in my ever so humble opinion it’s time to fish or cut bait. (Although I really don’t want Apple to give up, I like my Xserves far too much). Mac OS X is built on a platform of rock solid UNIX-y goodness. It’s in the same phylum as the Big Iron of Sun and HP. Those BSD roots run deep and pardon the buzzword-y jargon, but would it be so very difficult to try and leverage those roots and make some true headway into the “real” Enterprise world? And I’m willing to guess that there is a significant portion of Mac OS X users who actually enjoy dipping into the pool of love that is the Terminal. Apple builds stellar hardware (generally speaking, I’ve had terrific luck and have owned or managed a zillion Mac boxen). Moving into the space where the Big Boys live shouldn’t be that hard, should it?

I know, I know, “professional” I.T. folk and CIOs are notoriously spooked by even the mere mention of Apple. It’s like it’s a part of their engrained culture. Apple == Toy OS. They all remember some professional I.T. rag from the 80s blathering on about how “chatty” AppleTalk was and how it would choke their otherwise pristine Banyan Vines ‘nets. (Ancient history. TCP/IP won, OK?) Or even worse, “Those fruity machines the goofy black tee-shirt wearing and funny looking glasses having weirdos in Graphics make me buy.” And lots of those I.T. pros have significant investments in a Microsoft-centric world view. After all, they had to go to school and pay all that money to learn about Active Directory, etc. And that’s just considering the training of the professionals with MSCEs. Let’s not even go into hardware and software costs a company may have invested. And maybe it’s just my long standing belief in an I.T. High Priest Conspiracy theory speaking, but I know those people and that their livelihood depends on their secret keys of knowledge about “how it all works.” If they switched to an Xserve that almost never even needed to be re-booted and didn’t need constant love and devotion and tinkering, they might find themselves out of work. But that might just be the tin-foil wearing Mac inferiority complex part of me speaking.

Let me tell you a little bit about our set-up. We have an Xserve. It’s a quad Xeon model. Has pretty paltry 1GB of RAM. A hair or two under 1TB of internal storage. (It has three HDs, but I only use two 500 GB drives for data storage, the other 80 GB drive is just used as the System drive and some Mobile User folders.) It’s used almost exclusively as a File Server. I’ve also used it as a Firewall and Network Gateway, but then I reconfigured the network, which is what I do for fun on weekends, but that’s how I roll, kids. It’s also the Open Directory Master and almost all the Macs in the studio look to it for all kinds of System Preference mojo (things like printer, network, login prefs, etc.). You know how many times it has crashed since I set it up last year? Zero. It gets re-booted when security updates come out, but that’s about it. No muss, no fuss. Otherwise it just sits there churning HUNDREDS of GBs of data throughout the day. See, we are a graphic design studio. We work in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and generate tremendously large files every single day. It’s not uncommon for a designer to be working on a 250 MB Photoshop file residing on the server and him save that file over a dozen times. Multiply that by 13 designers. And that’s just in the morning. You know where processor usage floats during the day? I’ve seen it spike to 40% once or twice, but usually it’s in the 10% range. You think it couldn’t handle the Word or Excel docs of thousands of “normal” users? I’m thinking it could handle all of them with one processor tied behind its back.

And then nightly (and sometimes throughout the day, if I feel extra paranoid), that same server is running a lovingly hand coded rsync script to shoot every single byte of “changed” data over to a similarly configured Xserve (though the other one is only a dual G5), which sits in a physically remote data center. And, knock on formica, it never hiccups on either end. Is this a testament to how well I set up, configured and swaddled the machines when I got them? Highly doubtful. I’m not that clever. They “just work.” Though I am kind of proud of the rsync mojo I exhibited when I wrote the script.

Now certainly someone may come along and say, “Well, sure Jon, you are cute with your geek beard and all, but I can point to a dozen Windows Server or Debian boxen right here next to me that have even better uptimes. And I have a much longer geek beard than you. So there.” But my point is usually this. I don’t admin full time, not by a long stretch. Maybe 5-10% of my weekly time is spent on admin type duties. And usually, that time is spent fielding designer’s questions about Adobe products, not spoon feeding the server or the other Macs. So yes, certainly, a properly certified and blessed High Priest in the Order of MSCE can make a Windows box behave. But it has not been my experience that high reliability or “ease of server use” comes straight out of the box. There must needs be tinkering and fiddling with arcane settings to achieve that plane of “just working” serenity. On a purely anecdotal basis, I deem Linux to be even worse for that sort of thing. So there. And don’t make fun of my beard.

So why can’t that experience of ultra reliability, ease of use and pure niceness be translated into something an I.T. weenie can get into a lather over? I know a few I.T. fellows (they are all male, I’m sorry to say) and when I talk about what we do in the studio, they all say, “wow, sounds great, I hear those Xserves are nice.” And then they start talking about how their Dell box crashed incessantly before repeatedly raping their nostrils, forcibly shaving their cats and then setting fire to their cubicle and melting all their Star Wars action figures the other day.

Here’s my Plan™ for Apple Enterprise (is there really such a beast, or is it just a myth like the unicorn or Sting’s tantric abilities?)

First, my Apple buddies, keep building Enterprise class products. What you have in the form of the Xserve, XServe RAID and XSan is awesome. A wonderful effort, especially after some real dogs. Remember A/UX running on a IIfx? Or the Network Server 500 and 700? AppleShare IP 5 on a Quadra 9510? AppleShare 6? Quirky beasts all. Though I’d love to have one of those Network Servers, just so I could make a mini-fridge out of it. Plus, those also never crashed. They also ran AIX 4, which was always a bit of a dome scratcher.

Second, you have to do something to get Xserves into the data center. The proof of the reliability and wonderfulness is in the proverbial pudding and you can’t eat the pudding unless you can get the pudding into their bowls. (I may have over-extended the pudding metaphor as now I have a craving for a tapioca Snak-Pak). Possibly those Xserves need to enter under the cover of darkness. Remember way back in the day when the IntarWeb/Tubes was run on Solaris and SGI boxes that cost a ho-jillion dollars each and ran Netscape Enterprise Server (iPlanet, whatever)? The smart and geeky I.T. folks would sneak an old junky 486 into the data center, running Slackware and NSCA httpd and that would serve pages out to the rest of the planet. Then some big cheese would walk into a meeting, likely after having had lunch with a sales rep from Sun and proclaim, “we need a WebSite!” (Back in the day, kids, we InterCapped EverytThing in sight, no ExcepTions). And the clever I.T. guys would say, “we’re on it, boss” and then go back to trying to find that stupid amulet in NetHack, all the while knowing that their little and Free as in Beer Linux box was doing them up proud. Maybe that story is completely apocryphal, (that specific story I spun out of whole cloth), but the gyst is this: Linux was NOT acceptable to the Big Cheeses That Ran Things until it proved itself. No one would blink these days if you said, I’m going to run my entire web business on the back of software coded by guys with questionable hygiene and Cheet-o stained fingertips. Oh, and that software? Pretty much free. Though there is that thing about Linux only really being free if your time has no value, but that’s a different animal entirely.

What I’m saying is that you, Apple, have to work harder to get the Cheet-o lovers on your side. Sure, the bosses are going to look at the bottom line and how much it all costs, but the guys on the front line have to be sold on your stuff as well. And really, the combination of the hardware and software truly is stellar. They will all drink the Kool-Aid, I swear. You don’t know joy until you live with a box that just does its thing for days/weeks/months on end, without any futzing around.

Here’s one way to sell them: Every time you sell someone a shiny new Xserve, go ahead and outfit them with a MacBook “for admin purposes.” For cheap or close to nothing. You don’t technically need a Mac in order to admin an Xserve, but the Admin Tools are terrific and of course, Mac only. There’s a bit of the rub right there actually. I don’t think you can easily set up a headless Xserve without using a Mac. So look at this worst case scenario: some enterprising Apple Enterprise Sales Droid manages to sell an all Windows or Linux shop an Xserve. “Just try it out! Use it as a secondary Windows Domain Controller! Or to serve static Apache pages! Or as a mySQL box! Or a DNS server! An Open Directory Master or Slave! You’ll end up liking it! I promise!” (In my mind, all Apple Enterprise Sales Droids speak with exclamation points all the time, because, you know, they have the LOVE!) But then the Windows-only peeps get the Xserve, unwrap the beauty, plug it all in and SHA-ZAM! Nothing happens. Yeah, that’s not cool. You really need a Mac to plop the Wizardly Set-up Assistant on. The fresh as a daisy Xserve will go out an grab an IP address if it can find a DHCP server on the local ‘net, but that’s about it. It’ll sit there forever waiting to connect to a Setup Assistant wielding Mac.

Note, these days, if you buy an Xserve with a video card, you can do all the set up stuff on the box without too much difficulty, no Mac needed at all, just a monitor and USB keyboard. But if you leave off the vid card, you save $49! Plus, who wants to plug in a keyboard to your 1U box? ick.

So go ahead and ship a MacBook with the Xserve. It’s icing on the cake. That way our possibly Mac-vrigin I.T. guy will at least get the Mac experience. Fill it to the gills with RAM and also install Parallels. Or Boot Camp, whatever. Because he needs to be able to feel comfortable. And allowing him to run Mac OS X and XP (or Vista, *shudder*) at the same time is eleventy-forty kinds of awesome.

While we are at it; just buy Parallels, OK? And market the hell out of it as a way to “wean yourself off the Windows teat while using a Real Computer.”

Third and finally, go ahead and expand the high end Enterprise Product Line. A 2U box. A 4U monster. Hardware RAID options. Real documentation with real life examples. Easier set-up for failover scenarios. Just go ahead and make a synergy-full buzzword check list and fill in all the voids. You have to make both the I.T. front line people happy and their check writing bosses happy as well.

That is my plea and my plan, Apple. I’m sure no one at the Mothership is listening, but I had to get it off my chest. I use these products every day and they are excellent tools. Everyone should be able to use the tools of their choice, of course, but I really do think I.T. life would be so much easier if more I.T. pros gave Apple Enterprise class products a shot.

Finish Leopard, and then get on this stuff, please. That’s all I ask.

And send me an iPhone, please.

KTHXBYE!

</rant>

UPDATE: I just looked at the Apple Store and Apple does now offer an internal RAID card for the Xserve. So scratch that off the list. Way to advertise that, kids! Please, don’t let the Xserve become the new Mac Mini, a decent idea/rig that gets no love or devotion. Also, the placement of the links to the Server Products on the Apple Store is a perfect example of the “no joy” in Enterprise-ville stuff I’m talking about. It’s like you have to dig under a disease encrusted slimy ol’ rock to find an Xserve.

Posted by Jon on 08/09/07 at 10:41 AM

LOL Awesome post! My thoughts exactly! The day Apple values the business market more and caters more to them will be the day I go back to work for em

Posted by Rich on 08/09/07 at 07:33 PM
Thanks, Rich. I wondered what my favorite Apple Sales Droid might think about this topic. :-]

And don’t tell the Big O that you’d go back!

Posted by jon on 08/09/07 at 07:49 PM
There is way to much truth to the post to not voice my opinion.... My former unit at the mothership really showed no attention to us in regards to marketing the fact that Apple’s solutions could really attract the smb (my group) or enterprise customers and provide value them an awesome solution! No Joke after working 3 months at the Big O I am already over using XP Pro and I bring my MB pro to work every day, The beauty of the O is all the apps are web based and served thru an app server, anyone with a browser can reap the benefits! Just my ranting 2 cents! Good luck on the basement!

Posted by Rich on 08/09/07 at 10:15 PM

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Thursday, August 09, 2007

An Apple Nerd’s Wish List

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