Why I use a Mac, anno 2006 3709

OSX is indeed quite fragile- perhaps even more so than Windows. Not necessarily with respect to actual system lockups, but if a user starts working with fancying up the ipfw rules or making an OS X box act like a server, its not hard to wedge the UI so thoroughly that you have to turn off the box to reset it. smbfs mounts of Windows boxes are particularly mount protocol, the box can get quite jammed up.

WIndows has the same sorts of problems- my guess is it comes from trying to make the user interface too smart.

Its a heck of a lot easier to triage a sick machine when you can boot to a single user tty and fix the damn thing without waiting for a load of networking and graphics crap that you don't need for the job at hand.

The rents moved to a G4 OSX box as their internet gateway-firewall and server- it works well enough modulo problems as per above. The contingency system thats waiting offline as a backup is an old Sun Ultra 1 wdisk array and quad ethernet. Its so much easier to make a decent server out of Solaris or Linux that its not worth getting another Mac box to be the server.

Gregm