Hey guys, been researching this for the last couple of weeks and been trying to find a nice web based control panel that will work for this. The server is running OSX 10.3 and Darwin, which is BSD based. I've found through reading these forums (which are REALLY great btw) that the most common control panels are either Plesk, Ensim, Cpanel, CP+ or DA. So far, after researching, my favorites seem to be Plesk or CP+ from Psoft. I don't know how to get a trial version of Plesk since no one has anything certified on OSX, but I've heard of people using them. Has anyone even tried to use any web based control panels other than Webmin successfully on an Xserve? Thanks for your help guys.

Did you end up choosing a Control Panel for the Xserve? I'm using cPanel on FreeBSD systems and it's great. Two months ago I switched from a Dell Inspiron to a PowerBook and now I am so impressed with the products Apple is churning out that I'm seriously looking into the Xserve. Some folks at a BSD users group that I attend though are very wary about using MacOS as a server. Their concerns I think are primarily concerning performance.

What has your experience been? Anyone else with good/bad Xserve experiences, especially related to web hosting?

I got sick of waiting so I was trying to use Webmin. My problem is that I was full of expectations due to the Mac name. I fully expected them to have a good control panel, but nothing in there is as I expected. My other problem is that I'm from a Windows background with very little *nix experience. When trying to find out modules/software that will work on it, it's hard for me to tell if the software isn't working because I'm doing something wrong, or if it's because Darwin is just slightly different than actual BSD. I think that since CP+ is based on Webmin that it should work fine. I wanted to try something like Plesk, Ensim, or Cpanel but none of them have certified that their OSX version is ready and with my limited knowledge, I have to know that it's going to do what I need it to do.

Hi there,

I haven't found anything good for the mac.

One of my clients wanted to have Apache/Tomcat/MySQL installed and running on a mac OS X (10.2.8) and I had to do all the configuration manually.

I'm just trying to say that although there are no "real" control panels for managing a Mac server... it can be done.

Good Luck.

Lamp.

Cooll; thanks for the info. I've been drooling over the Xserve for the past several days, but I need a good Control Panel. I can do UNIX administration without it, but it saves me so much time (i.e. one click to setup a new account th at a client ordered from the website). I have other things to do with my time rather than constantly re-compiling Apache! ;)

If you know basic stuff, that should help quite a bit. I've found that webmin seems to be pretty good and with virtualmin, aside from a couple of problems that I've had, I think that virtualmin would work for you. Another option would be CP+ as I've found out that it's basically webmin with a different GUI and a slightly easier interface. Since webmin's "certified" for OSX and CP+ is a variation of webmin, I think that it would work. I've rebuilt this server 6 times already just getting the hang of things but I'm learning more and more about the way things work and what's the same and different about Darwin vs BSD or Linux.

I know that the Xserve is a great product, I just think I'm missing something easy. :)

I would like to know if any one in this thread found a good control panel for OSX. We just took delivery of our first X Serve machine. Thus far it looks the contenders are Cpanel and Webmin. Any other suggestions?

Unfortunately, OSX is not yet supported for Cpanel. That's the problem. Nothing is supported for OSX except for Webmin. I'm still learning things and have gotten pretty good success, but still have a few problems with virtualmin module, which is what I need. I'm open to suggestions if someone finds something else.