A migration project changes everything

Having done IT for so long, I’m used to struggling with real-world scenarios and limitations. I routinely think about what things cost to buy and run, and I’m permanently attuned to the IT clock of fiscal quarters and years.

All of this work is done in a stand-alone IT operation that I call my core. My core is the only IT operation I can see or use; I am not connected to InfoWorld’s well-run grid. Running my own operation aids my perspective.

For cost and technical reasons, I decided several weeks ago to migrate my IT core from Windows to Apple OS X Server. I couldn’t power-down all of the Windows servers until I’d duplicated their services on the OS X side. That went smoothly for Web, database, authentication, management, and most other services. But I hit snags moving two services: file/print and e-mail. OS X uses Samba to emulate a Windows file/print server, a service I need when I review PCs and Windows software. To my surprise, though, OS X mimics a Windows file/print server relatively poorly, while Windows, with Services for Macintosh, does a dead-on Mac server impersonation. I can’t blame it on Samba; it works fine under Yellow Dog Linux on a Power Mac G4. Samba 3.0, a component of the next OS X release (10.3, or Panther) might address this.

E-mail will be a much tougher problem to solve. My Windows mail server is not Exchange – which I could toss without a thought – but MDaemon, a lightweight, do-it-all server from alt-n Technologies. I tried to teach OS X’s sendmail, then Panther’s Postfix, to do what MDaemon does. After considerable effort, I doubt it’s likely I can use either of OS X’s built-in mail services. I’m looking into Stalker Software’s Communigate Pro, an OS X mail server similar in capabilities to MDaemon.

I think the news from the client side is more interesting because it caught me by surprise. Over the course of a week, my two-headed (dual display) Power Mac G5 became, without my conscious effort to make it so, the nerve center and productivity hub for my entire lab.

I kept loading the Power Mac G5 with software. Right now, on the Cinema display, iChat and iCal are open. So is Radio Userland. I have Terminal Server sessions open to two PCs under test (one is a laptop). I'm watching my Xserve cluster fill my Xserve RAID with a huge tests database. The Xserve RAID admin console is visible just to make sure that I don’t actually set the thing on fire. There are two text Terminal windows, one local and one remote, and an X Window session into an Opteron Linux server that’s running SPEC benchmarks.

What surprised me is that as I opened each of the windows I planned to use, I didn’t feel the need to close others to keep things “clean.” It isn’t a question of real estate or performance or capacity. It’s subjective, and I haven’t found a way to explain it to myself much less express it here.

My standard desktop has been four PCs and a keyboard/video/mouse switch. I have always multitasked deeply (to observers, disturbingly so), but serially. Concurrent multitasking is a trick I periodically attempt, but I always return to my KVM switch. For the past couple of weeks, that switch and its connected PCs have been idle. Sometimes I forget that the consolidation of thought and working style is as important as the consolidation of technology.