I use a Belkin F5D5055 Gigabit USB 2.0 ethernet adapter with OS X Server on my little media machine at home. You need to use the USBAx8817x 1.0.3b12 driver from http://www.sustworks.com/site/news_usb_ethernet.html to make it work properly (the Apple driver seems to work at first glance, but it's actually rather glitchy - try pinging and you'll see the problem).

Been using it for nearly a year now and although the performance is obviously not gigabit speeds over USB 2.0, it's much faster than 100mbps ethernet. Perfect for an extra port. Or if you prefer the 'security' of Apple's drivers, get one of their USB ethernet adapters. Slower, but also rock solid.

There's a nice set of introductory videos from Apple on iTunes too. Just do a search in podcasts for "leopard server". It's the previous version, but the fundamentals (and most of the software) is near identical.

Believe me, if the DNS goes weird on OS X Server, you do a clean reinstall. Especially if you have no pressing reason not to.

You can't run OS X Client as a virtual machine, I'm afraid. Apple says "no".

You can run OS X Server as a virtual machine. Apple says "yes!".

I'm glad this article points out some of the pitfalls of OS X Server. I've been using it for some fairly large user groups since 10.4 and there has been a marked improvement in 10.6, but it's certainly not something I would describe as completely 'IT department free', as Apple do. Most admins will remember diving into config files to fix the DHCP issues; everything clamming up because of the DNS chicken-and-egg situation; the bizarre Active Directory 'magic triangle'; the mysterious ability for anyone to be able to log in if you've got Active Directory users in an Open Directory group. That last one still hasn't been fixed for Leopard, which is potentially a huge security hole.

But once you have it running, it does run very well, and 10.6 is the best of the bunch. Even if upgrading from 10.5.8 did kill my directory and require a clean reinstall. But then I've come to expect that behaviour. ;)

Chilly on the willy?

I'd always assumed iFixit put them back together again afterwards; I've not seen many of their 'teardowns' where the device couldn't have been reassembled. Although, for them I suppose the spare parts are more than a little handy...

I'd completely forgotten about the referral thing! :)

I've still got some left, so hit the link below and you (and I) will get an extra 250MB from Dropbox for not-a-sausage.

https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTMzMTcyMDk

Cheers!

Oh, heck. Down to one FireWire port now, are we? I'm happy it's FW800, but the previous versions had FW400 and FW800, albeit without the extra USB. This was perfect for our hot-desk studios; FW400 for the audio interface, FW800 for the drives. But this update means that we would now have to unplug the audio interface, attach a HDD, get a FW800 -> FW400 cable and daisy-chain the two. For every studio user who brings in a drive. And Pro Tools isn't a fan of USB drives... oh, no.

There's enough space on the back of those 24"-ers for a FW400 port as well. Probably even on the 20". Bad Apple. You're going to make life difficult for me when upgrade time comes around.

Would have been nice to have that on the box. But, face recognition works nicely on my G4, so I can't say I'm cut up about it. I updated the graphics card in my PowerMac though, so I bet it would cope fine with the transitions...

I can't believe that the iPhone doesn't do this by default. Sometimes Apple's 'complete system' approach does leave a bit to be desired.

I've got an Airport Express, and I would have expected that an iPhone (or iPod touch!) would have some built-in way to send the audio wirelessly to the Express, or to remote control a Mac over wireless to do the job for it.

Shame on Apple for leaving such a gaping hole.