[nickyp]

I concur!

Ran a couple of Xserves a while ago to run web application stacks on it and most of the time I diverged from using the GUI to administer things I shot myself in the foot (Apache, firewalls, initscripts, networking etc.).

The nice hardware - those CPU load meters were gorgeous - unfortunately doesn't make up for those problems so I switched back to non Apple hardware + Linux and never looked back.

Don't fight the system is a nice mantra to follow when using Mac OS X Server and that's not hard when you use it to administer a collection of other Macs & the network they're on or when using the built-in services without wanting to tweak/upgrade the versions yourself (iCal server, Mail server etc.).

[polynomial]

> most of the time I diverged from using the GUI to administer things I shot myself in the foot

This is something you hopefully learned early or were told by an more experienced Mac admin— configuring, let alone automating, Xserves from a CLI is an exercise in futility as so many components system have been rewritten to do things "the Apple Way."

[nickyp]

Learned that soon enough, only 2 Xserves were used and the rest of the rack quickly went back to Linux ;-) Although those puppies are still up-and-running of course (my Xserve adventure was in 2003)