Kasper JadeAfter much anticipation, today Apple unveiled its revised line of aluminum PowerBook G4 laptops during an early morning keynote in Paris, France. Along with the new portables, Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, officially announced the company's new Wireless Bluetooth Mouse and Keyboard.
Meanwhile, back in Cupertino it's business as usual. According to sources, Apple has just seeded developers with build 7B63 of Mac OS X Panther Server. According to the information provided to testers, Apple is urging that any third party software that manages data, performs backups or restores, maintains the file system, works with databases, performs content filtering or plugs into the mail server, be extensively tested under the new build.
Also provided to developers is a Mac OS X Server Test plan. Developers are asked to confirm that their software can run in a headless environment, can be managed remotely, is compatible with the case sensitivity of HFS+, can interactive with Open Directory, can support Partitions greater than 2TB (terabytes) and function properly while connected to very large directory systems.
According to sources, the build notes accompanying the server software currently list only one known issue. Users of the pre-released system may experience random crashes of Directory Services. Apple is apparently aware of the issue and is actively researching it.
The current build of Panther Server is being seeded as a 3 CD set and supports clean (erase all) installs and remote installs. The first two CDs contain the core system software while the third CD is comprised of Server Administration Tools. This last CD can be installed on a machine running Panther — other than the server — for remote server administration and configuration.
Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Server will support hard drive partitions of up to 16TBs.
Christine McKee
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
Malcolm Owen
William Gallagher
