Why I use a Mac, anno 2006 3714

Oh get real- if I set up a startupitem in OS X that sets up a firewall & NAT for an internal network (which, by the way, also has to periodically re-hostname the machine because OS X's dhcp client always does that and theres no way to control it), I can lock up the gui before the user even logs in. Better hope ssh is running so you can get in there to clean it up. If ssh-telnet isn't running, and the gui is locked up because its sensitive to the ipfw rules, how am I supposed to fix the machine? And how do I clear smbfs mounts that have failed, leaving the gui unresponsive and all attempts to unjam the mounts themselves get stuck? Is this the behavior of an advanced OS?

awfully nice to have that feature available- and OS X does not, which basically makes OS X only suitable for uncustomized desktop use. Not that I have a gripe with it in that role either- it seems reasonable enough if you stay within the click and drool fence, but comes unglued pretty fast once you're down at the command line.

After we're done talking about not having a single user tty diagnostics mode, then we can talk about the abysmal service management "features" in OS X. I thought the Linuxetc-init.d stuff was a bit tedious, but its at least maintainable and sort of documented because just its a bunch of scripts- but that startupitems stuff in OS X is a nightmare. It looks cute in a weblog talking about a single task but theres no way to keep track of a complex suite of daemons- and I've yet to find any documentation that shows how the startup sequencing actually works...

If the Apple people want to see how daemon-service management is done, they should go have a look at Solaris 10.

Gregm