I always hand out the bad news first. Now for the good news on the Tiger upgrade front. Upgrade-in-place (not archive/install) OS X installs of Tiger on my Power Mac G5 and OS X Server on Xserve G5 came off smooth as you please. There's something about expecting trouble that keeps it at bay. I used an external LaCie DVD burner to install OS X Server on Xserve. Apple (thank you, thank you) ships CD-ROM media in t I always hand out the bad news first. Now for the good news on the Tiger upgrade front.Upgrade-in-place (not archive/install) OS X installs of Tiger on my Power Mac G5 and OS X Server on Xserve G5 came off smooth as you please. There’s something about expecting trouble that keeps it at bay.I used an external LaCie DVD burner to install OS X Server on Xserve. Apple (thank you, thank you) ships CD-ROM media in the retail OS X Server box along with the DVD. That benefits us behind-the-timers with CD slot drives in our server boxes, but if I didn’t have an external DVD drive, I’d buy one to make these upgrades and installs easier, not only on servers but on notebooks where the internal drives are so comparatively slow. The Tiger installer’s option to slurp in user data and apps from other systems or partitions is very useful for production systems. I’ve used this to create dual-boot Panther/Tiger setups on my Power Mac G5 and 17-inch PowerBook. There are other, faster ways to go about this, but none as simple or foolproof as the installer’s one-click approach.I walked through OS X Server 10.4’s new and enhanced feature set and decided, case by case, whether I’d finesse my Panther configs or wipe them out and start clean. Sometimes configurations get crufty over time, and an OS upgrade is a good excuse to scrape off the barnacles. I expect systems to wobble a bit after these cleanings. OS X Server did wobble, but it was my own doing. I had trouble with permissions, and in places where I had mixed BSD flat-file configs with those in the Netinfo database. I can’t help it. Netinfo will always be foreign to me.It’s a topic I’m saving for my upcoming print review of Tiger, but I want to mention here that this is the first OS X Server release that I’m comfortable running with a headless server. I’ll keep my Xserve G5 hooked to my KVM switch, but I pulled the head off my Xserve (G4) and did a remote install. OS X Server’s administration command set is still esoteric from a Unix standpoint, but all system properties are covered and management is fully scriptable. It’s lovely, especially for non-Mac types who don’t want to muck around figuring out what’s in System Preferences and what lives in the GUI admin tools. Apple Remote Desktop 2 went useless on me before the Tiger upgrades, freezing and crashing during active sessions. I had taken to using Chicken of the VNC to get remote GUI. That deprived me of all the remote installation, maintenance and reporting ARD has built in. After I installed Tiger, I downloaded the Remote Desktop 2.2 update from Apple and pushed it out to all of the Macs on my LAN. ARD is now working as advertised. Screen updates are slower, but I don’t care.ARD is just as valuable for servers as it is for clients. ARD is a convincer for those non-believers who look at the Mac and say, “I can’t manage Macs on my {brand W} network!” Sit Mr. Windows down with a copy of ARD and the server admin tools and dare him to find something he can’t manage remotely. And be sure to mention that OS X has a shell.And while we’re on that subject, Tiger now ships with KornShell. Not zsh which claims to be an almost clone, or bash which “incorporates some KornShell-like features.” The real, true, David G. Korn shell that’s deserving of the book of its own that bears his name. I know I had other avenues for getting KornShell, but that Apple chose to bundle it pleases me almost as much as having the shell. It’s a proper language, by the way. I have lots of other thoughts to share, but I’ll close with this: I’ve reached the point where I believe that system-attached storage is evil. I have two Xserve G4s, an Xserve G5, a Power Mac G5 and a dual/dual Opteron tower all feeding from one Xserve RAID array. I’m running a mix of dedicated partitions and Xsan (Xsan for the Macs), and with those approaches available from a single array/switch set, there really aren’t any storage configurations I can’t set up. This is another instance where I took advantage of the scheduled downtime to make fuller use of the resources in my shop. I split one of my logical arrays to dedicate one to a growing collection of text files (e-books, US Code, catalogs…) to test searching and indexing, especially Spotlight. I’ll let you know how that goes.It’s so much fun fiddling with Tiger that I’m almost reluctant to flip the switch that puts OS X Server back on the air.——– Technology Industry