In July of 2007, the Samba group announced that it would be moving to version 3 of the Free Software Foundation’s General Public License. Prior to Lion Server, Samba was how OS X Server handled Windows file- and print-serving tasks. Prior to Lion Server, OS X used Samba, an excellent open-source project that allows non-Windows platforms to both access and serve files as a Windows server. It doesn’t provide you with any more capability than you’re going to get from other platforms like Linux, BSD, or Windows, with the exception that it’s based on Unix, and so you can use Unix tools without a lot of work. When it comes to things like pure web hosting, there’s not a lot of advantage to using OS X Server. For web publishing, it’s clear that Apple wants you to use the Wiki/Blog service built into Lion Server, rather than build sites the traditional way. Apache provides the back end for the web UI in things like Profile Manager you need it for the Wiki service, file sharing for iOS devices, and other services. For example, if you take the time to look at how Lion Server works and what it does with Apache and web services, it’s obvious that Apple looks at Apache as a way to get things done.

The lack of a GUI is upsetting, but in light of what Apple thinks of as its main customer base, this makes some sense.

In the case of iChat server, the differences are rather minor. In some cases, especially with the web server, this is a bit of a shock, because the differences in the GUI between versions 10.6 and 10.7 are rather huge. All post-enablement SNMP configuration happens in text files and the command line. For things like SNMP, all the GUI ever did was let you turn it on. Even though Apple provided a GUI for DNS, if you wanted to do anything other than the absolute basics, you had to learn the guts of DNS in the command line.

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