This past week, I started learning about OS X server. The interface really confused me at first as there are lots of different options buried in lots of different places. After a few hours of playing around, I started making headway on figuring out what stuff did, but it wasn’t pretty. I then tried to use the GUI to turn on some other features and found out that it hung the system; I had to use the command line to kill off what I tried. Furthermore, I made a mistake and deleted an SSL certificate; when I went to add it back, it kept failing. The log gave a cryptic error message and after some searching, I found a reference to the keychain. So I used Apple Remote Desktop to connect to the server and look at the keychain (the keychain can’t be access using the server admin software), removed some pieces from the keychain and then I had no problem importing the certificate again. While Apple did an OK job (I’m not impressed with the UI) integrating UNIX tools into OS X, I’m not convinced that the GUI on OS X server is all that useful if I keep having to fight it to get stuff working.
On Tuesday, a friend of mine is going to teach me about OS X server; maybe it will change my view on it, especially if I can get everything working.