After a week of playing with Lion on the desktop and Lion on the server I can safely say that the first is a very nice experience, and I’m absolutely loving Mission Control. It’s definitely best adapted for trackpad based machines, but even the Magic Mouse does a decent job as long as you poke around to find the gesture shortcuts. A two finger double tap brings up Mission Control for example.
On the server front the return is mixed. I finally went out and got an SSL certificate for the server and am now able to easily connect to mail, CalDAV and CardDAV securely with no annoying messages about self-signed certificates and the like. File Sharing is pretty low on my current use cases as most of my file serving is done via NFS from the napp-it equipped Solaris and Nexenta machines, coupled with the latest netatalk revision for Lion Time Machine compatibility, but as far as I’ve looked, it too works nicely.
The new webmail replacement for SquirrelMail is much much nicer, although for the life of me I don’t understand why they simply haven’t ported the MobileMe/iCloud interface.
The pain comes in when you need to do anything even vaguely complicated with apache. Configuration options are scattered here and there as the system-wide services like Webmail and wiki are not configured in the web section, but rather in the Mail and Wiki sections, but it’s not immediately obvious how they interact with your virtual hosts. And here’s where it get ugly. The Server configuration tools make a whole pile of assumptions about how people will want to use Lion Server as a web host and they are very restrictive. Out of the box, Lion will not let you create name based virtual hosts and you will just frustrate yourself trying. There’s a new KB article that has a kind of workaround, but it hasn’t really solved the problem for me.
Surprisingly the GlobalSAN iSCSI Initiator is working just fine for me.
Wiki
The actual wiki engine has been completely rewritten in Ruby on Rails, using Postgres as the the back end instead of the original file based system. From a user interaction point of view it’s really quite nice. But themes went away so you’re stuck with a single look and feel for the moment. I’ve started poking around in /usr/share/collabd and I think that I’ve identified the main .css files, so theoretically, you should be able to modify much of the look and feel, but any changes will almost certainly be overwritten with a system update, so you’ll need to ensure you have some way of reinjecting your custom code.
You can no longer associate (not that it worked very well under Snow Leopard either) the wiki or webmail services with specific virtual hosts - it’s an all or nothing URL rewrite that is implemented.
Documentation
This time around there are only a few detailed PDF documents for Lion Server, and they are very very lightweight. There’s a basic online help, ostensibly masquerading as the Advanced Administration Guide, but it falls dramatically short when compared against the extensive documentation offered with Snow Leopard Server. There are a few sections that include infromation concerning some of the configuration options for the wiki, but nothing at all about how to integrate your own javascript or css files as was explained in the Snow Leopard documentation.
Server.app vs Server Admin
For some bizarre reason, the new Server.app administration tool can manage only a subset of your server configuration. For others you need to download the Server Admin Tools. Others includes some core features like DNS which are an absolute necessity if you’re setting up the main server for your office since nothing will work properly in the Server.app if your DNS isn’t configured correctly before you get started.
Performance
Overall performance is reasonable, but I’m noting a much higher CPU load that previously. I’m running it on a 2Gb mid-2007 Mac Mini and I have practically no memory available most of the time which forces it out to swap fairly regularly. I would say that it’s really oriented towards the current generation of machines and would highly recommend looking into a machine with a Core i5/7 processor and fast memory rather than any of the Core 2 Duo based machines.
But the performance issue on my machine may be due to some of the problems a number of people have seen where they are getting regular errors of :
nstat_lookup_entry failed: 2
Upshot
The release feels rushed to me. I’m guessing that the Server development team had their deadlines shortened to match up with the Lion release date. This is especially evident when it comes to the documentation, as we all know that the documentation is the last thing that gets done on a project. But now that the Server component is an app store distribution, I’m hoping to see some updates coming down the pipe that will address some of these issues.
If you are currently running a Snow Leopard Server and it’s working for you, I’d recommend against the upgrade until you get a chance to review in detail the impact of migrating. If you have multiple web sites hosted on your existing server then you definitely do not want to upgrade until Apple issue a patch to get that stuff sorted out.
If you just want a departmental or small business server to host mail, wiki, VPN and so on, it really is quite nice.
But in the meantime, I’m filing radars as I go along. If you have developer account I strongly recommend that you file bug reports for everything that isn’t working for you so that we can get some action faster.