Since I got my new Sony TR1 laptop, I don't need the iBook any more. So
it's had Linux taken off it and Panther installed, for my wife to use.
This is my first concerted use of OS X for a good while, and I was
impressed.
The hardest bit of the install has been getting the machine to play
nicely with the resources already on my network.
- WebDAV over HTTPS isn't supported. This is a nuisance, as I figured
WebDAV would be the easiest way to make our network shares available.
This meant I couldn't escape setting up a VPN...
- VPN. I had to set up a PPTP VPN for my home network to let the iBook
in from the wireless network. Not entirely trivial: it meant
patching the kernel and pppd for my Debian 3.0 gateway box. This finally worked when I stopped my
gateway from reconfiguring the firewall when the PPTP PPP interface
came up. It was causing a race condition which mean the PPTP negotiation
was failing.
- Printing. OS X uses CUPS, and gives it a nice GUI. However, the
pretty GUI wouldn't set the right path to my printer, so I had to
grub around in the web interface to set this properly.
- Secure email. My IMAP and SMTP services are only available over SSL/TLS
connections. This meant teaching Panther about the certificates I used.
Unfortunately, nothing could persuade Panther to accept my own local
certificate authority, so I had to switch to self-signed certificates.
(These can be imported by copying the certificate PEM file to a file with
.cer suffix, double-clicking, and adding into the X509Anchors keychain.)
The general verdict is good: Panther seems to work more or less as
advertised, but I had to adjust my local network setup somewhat to appease
it. The only profoundly annoying bug is that applications such as iChat don't
recognise a change in the default route. So, if you're chatting away, then
bring the VPN up, your iChat needs to be restarted.
One workaround, preventing the VPN getting the default route, involves hacks to /usr/sbin/pppd. Bad!
Though the UI is great, there's nothing from a system administration
perspective that convinces me OS X is any easier than Windows or Linux to
administer.