I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal
So you selected Advanced Setup during the wizard while you were installing Mac OS X Server and now you’re looking at this new Server Admin screen that you’ve never seen before. You see the server name but there are no services in the list. This is because Apple has gone the extra step to make Server Admin less confusing and more user friendly than ever before. When you click on the Settings icon at the top of the Server Admin screen you will see the tab for Services. Here, you can enable or disable any service by checking its box and clicking on the Save button.
Once a service has been enabled then it will appear under the server in the Servers list (notice it no longer says Sites and Services). From here, you’ll notice that the old chicklets from the bottom screen are gone. Now they have been replaced with an icon set in the toolbar that changes as you click between the services. For example, the AFP Service shows Overview, Logs, Graphs, Connections and Settings. Clicking through these icons, you’ll notice that they provide the same experience that the chicklets at the bottom of the screen provided. However, by placing them at the top the user interface makes more sense. One thing that is a bit strange is the decision to move the Start and Stop buttons to the bottom of the screen. When you enable a service it will not start by default so if you want to begin using it look to the bottom of the list and click on the Start button for the service.
When you enable and then click on each service you will notice that many have the same options that they’ve had in the past. There are exceptions (like a more granular logging tab for the FTP service), as there are with every version. But for the most part many of the settings have stayed the same through a few versions of the OS because they just make sense in how they are laid out.
New Services added are Radius, Podcast Producer, MySQL (which actually existed in its own stand-alone application before) and iCal. Each of these has a great purpose and will hopefully be explored in detail as time goes on. You might notice that one service, Applications, is gone from the list. Tomcat has now been moved into the Web Service as a checkbox (Enable Tomcat).
So that’s the quick and dirty tour of the new Server Admin application. It’s sleeker and has a (in our opinion) much improved interface over the old Server Admin.
