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What Is A Mac Server
For those of you who don’t really understand where or how your web page is sitting on your hosting Mac Server, this is a basic over view of how it works.
A Mac Server is basically hardware and software and protocol. We will go over these three basics of your hosting Mac Server.
• Mac OS X Server hardware.
Mac Server hardware is so similar to your old PC hardware that the price of Mac Server hardware has come down considerably. Down enough that it’s tempting for a lot of us to host our own Mac Server. But that’s a whole different article. All a Mac Server is:
• Very fast processor.
• A large amount of RAM.
• A vast amount of Disk Space.
• Connection to a T1 line (access to the outside world).
The hardware is housed in very large office buildings. There are many racks of Mac Servers filling these climate controlled rooms. Most of the Mac Server host brag of their 99r better uptime. This is very impressive and another reason to use a Mac Server host. How often have you re-booted your PC in the past?
• Software. (Operating system)
OS X Lion is built on a fully compliant UNIX foundation. This battle-tested core provides stability, performance, and security. And full UNIX conformance ensures compatibility with existing server and application software.
Designed for “headless” operation, Mac OS X server system enables administrators to install and configure services without needing to connect a display to the server. Powerful remote administration tools allow secure service management from anywhere on the network or over the Internet, and support for SSH provides secure access from the UNIX command line. To keep critical services up and running, Mac OS X server system has built-in tools for monitoring systems, preventing accidental shutdown, and recovering services quickly in case of network or power failure.
There different operating systems on the market. Most likely the software on your Mac Server is running Apache on Linux, an open source product. Mac Servers need to be secured and an open source application is more likely to be less buggy and more secure then their larger competitor Microsoft.
These Mac Servers use an interface for you to access and configure them, a control panel. Some control panels are more complicated then others. Depending how technical you are, this is a point of concern when picking a Mac Server host.
• Protocol. (FTP)
To get your page on the Mac Server you need to FTP (file transfer protocol). FTP is a client (you) Mac Server application. If you created your page on your desk top, obviously to share it you would need to get it on your Mac Server. It’s also used to transfer files between your own pc to someone else’s computer.
Multithreaded TCP stack
Mac OS X server system uses a fully multithreaded TCP stack with dedicated write and read threads for each network interface. To improve performance and to avoid lock contention with multicore, multi-NIC, and 10Gb Ethernet networks, the TCP stack maintains a dedicated pool of memory buffers for each CPU.
Multilink multihoming
Multilink multihoming enables Mac OS X server system to host multiple IP addresses on the same or multiple network interfaces. This is ideal for connecting your server simultaneously to multiple networks, such as a public and a private network, or hosting multiple websites, each with its own IP address.
IPv6
Most services in Mac OS X server system support Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6. To support the industrywide IP transition, OS X Lion includes an IPv4-to-IPv6 gateway that enables the deployment of IPv4-based server services in IPv6 networks.
IPSec
IPSec is a set of general-purpose protocols for protecting TCP/IP communications. Its network-layer cryptography mechanism provides privacy using data and packet-header encryption, integrity and packet-origin authentication, and key management. Although part of the IPv6 standard, IPSec can also be used with IPv4
This is a very simplistic overview of what a Mac Server host is, but I hope it will give you a basic idea how it works.
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