- This is an Apple computer,
but unlike the ones that you've used before,
it's not pretty because it's intended
to be hidden away in a server rack.
I know, right?
Like, what?
I mean, when you think of Apple,
you think of consumer electronics
because that's the only thing that they advertise.
But they not only made servers, but they quietly did so
for over 20 years,
and by the time they reached their final form,
these things could be found in businesses and schools
throughout the world being used for everything
from file serving, to media workflow acceleration,
to Microsoft Active Directory Services.
Wait, an Apple server for a Microsoft?
Anyway, the point is they were unlike
other Apple products in many ways.
For one, the Xserve lineup was positioned
as a budget alternative to premium solutions from PC makers.
It's upside down world.
It raises so many questions like, why was it so cheap?
Did it have any redeeming qualities?
Why did Apple ultimately pull the plug?
To find out, we bought the last Xserve machine
that Apple ever produced,
and we're gonna take it out for a rip.
This is gonna be fun, bud.
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We considered the 2009 Xserve 3,1
to be the last real server from Apple
because while there were server versions
of the Mac Mini until 2012,
they were basically the same as their desktop counterparts.
Just with some minor tweaks to the specs.
With third party accessories,
they could be used to fill the Apple shaped void
in an organization's rack, but it was pretty clear
that Apple's focus had moved on,
and over the next 10 years, they would slowly chip away
at the functionality of their macOS server software
until its eventual death in 2022.
But enough about that.
We've got a Mac server in its prime,
and this is my first hands on.
What exactly did they think different?
Well, for a server, she's definitely
pretty slick and stylish in weighs only a mere 40 pounds.
Most of the drive base not populated.
The system identifier button
is on both the front and the back.
When you press it, it flashes both of them,
which is a nice little quality of life feature
that makes it easy to locate on the rack.
On the other side of our front USB
is our ethernet port lights.
Then right of that are the system activity lights.
If you hold down the power button
and the identifier button to boot,
that allows you to use the lights
to select a boot method without requiring
a monitor or any input devices.
Now, given its utility as a file server and a media server,
you'd think it would have a lot more drive base.
It has only three by default.
Ah, an Xserve server would normally be paired
with an X RAID, which as you probably guessed,
is a rack mounted RAID enclosure
that would sit either right above it or right below it,
giving it an additional 14 drive base.
Now, obviously we're not gonna deploy this thing
so we don't need one of those, but we do need at least one,
and we were missing all of the out of the box
so we had to order one off of eBay.
As it turns out, the sleds are proprietary,
which isn't uncommon,
but the connectors are also proprietary, which is uncommon.
We received what may have been
one of the last remaining sealed Xserve drives in existence.
Fun fact by the way, for both the Xserve and the X RAID,
the drives themselves are just standard
SATA and SAS hard drives.
And then beyond adapting them to this proprietary interface,
Apple also went a step further and vendor locks them
through the firmware.
So even if you could get your hands on random extra sleds,
you couldn't simply upgrade them
with off the shelf replacements.
Bastards.
They weren't the only ones who pulled this kind of crap.
That doesn't make it okay.
I can't wait to take this apart.
This thing is just kinda wild to me, right?
Some stuff may not be normal today, but was at the time
like having a slim optical drive
in the front of your server.
But other things were weird even then,
like the fact that it has fire wire ports
and mini display port instead of just basic VGA.
How does Apple always manage to make hardware
look so pretty?
And what are you?
You look like a weird little drive of some sort.
Yo, Tanner.
- [Tanner] Yes.
- What the devil is this little guy here?
- That little guy is the primary hard drive for it.
So even when-
- It is the drive.
- Yeah, even when all three of these are empty,
your operating system's still gonna go on there.
- And it uses a proprietary connector because just it can?
I'm assuming I'm gonna find the fans
under the cool little shrap.
Yes, so there they are.
They may be short, but boy, are they ever thick.
What is this card?
This thing is chock full of what appears
to be both NAND flash and DRAM?
Tanner, when you told me this thing is basically
just a 2009 Mac Pro but in server form,
I didn't think I was gonna be finding whatever this is.
- [Tanner] Would that possibly be a RAID card?
- Oh yes, that is very possible.
Confirmed this is a RAID card,
and you could apparently buy this RAID card
as a PCIE card as well.
That is hilarious.
And if I had to guess, I would say this plug right here
is the same one that this one is using
for its backup battery
because I don't see a backup battery in here.
And under normal circumstances,
you would wanna have a battery on a hardware RAID card
because that way, any data that was in flight
like sitting in the cash on the RAID card
about to be written to the hard drives
in the event of a sudden power loss,
could be preserved by keeping the card powered
so that it could be flushed to the drives after the fact.
Or it's possible that Apple assumed
that if this thing is sitting in a data center somewhere-
- [David] Oh no.
- That there should be no reason
for it to suddenly lose power.
I need to find all those screws.
Fortunately, I've got the LTT store screwdriver
complete with magnet screw finding bit.
Hopefully these are Ferris screws.
Ah, yes they are.
Oh, good. One, two.
Got another dual gigabit network card here.
I'm assuming this is just gigabit, right?
- Yes. - Yep.
All right, nothing special about that
but what I'm really interested in is this card under it.
You know what this looks like?
An MXM module.
Is that what it is?
Is this a GPU?
- [Tanner] Yep.
- Why the hell are they putting laptop GPUs in servers?
Oh, and it's NVIDIA.
This is before they started quarreling
and didn't use any of each other's products
anymore for anything.
What is this?
- [Tanner] I believe that is a GT130.
- I love when Apple builds in
upgradeability into their products,
and then completely abandons them like the 2019 Mac Pro.
You know, this reminds me of the 2019 Mac Pro
in more ways than one.
You've got the unrealized upgrade potential,
and then you've also got the fact
that it's a rack mounted server version
of what is essentially the same hardware
running the same software, macOS.
It's just that when the 2019 version rolled around
and we thought, ooh, maybe they'll, you know,
pay attention to the server space again,
clearly that didn't happen and oh wait,
yeah, I guess that's not really a difference
'cause that also happened here.
They were also both based on Intel platforms
with risk-based CPUs that would proceed and follow them.
One difference is that I wouldn't describe
the Xserve lineup as a failure.
So where did these things come from?
Well, it was ultimately Apple's strong foothold
in the education and media sectors
that really kept these things alive.
So naturally, those are two areas that remain strong targets
when their enterprise equipment first started rolling out
with the new OS X created as a rebrand
with the return of Steve Jobs,
and the later release of the iPod.
So to continue to fit into these markets,
they allowed easy integration
into existing Windows heavy environments,
easy creation and maintenance of workflows
for things like network installation
of newly purchased Macs, and a video podcast creation system
that required minimal human intervention
that ran best on Xserve.
This last point is also important
because it allowed Apple
to help saturate the podcast section of iTunes
with videos that were made to be viewed on things
like the existing iPod video, and then later the iPhone.
Educators could put lectures online,
media companies could expand to new mediums,
and enthusiasts were rewarded for their purchase
with some of that delicious sweet content.
Mm, content.
Oh yeah, right.
We're supposed to be making content about this.
Let's turn it on.
Wow, those are just about the brightest
network activity indicator LEDs I have ever seen.
I'm here for it.
I appreciate that.
Hey, look at that!
What's my name?
- LTT. - Daddy?
Oh, sorry, what?
We're booted up into Snow Leopard,
but the way we got here was very complicated.
With no drive for it,
the system initially booted into recovery for Yosemite.
But recovery would get stuck
because it required an Apple ID.
Well, Apple IDs these days require
two factor authentication,
which is something that was missing from the sign-in process
on our Yosemite recovery drive.
The workaround is to put the 2FA number
at the end of the password.
But then, it refused to authenticate
because the TLS and SSL encryption
that were baked into the operating system
were using expired keys,
and there was no way to update them.
The newest macOS version that supports the Xserve
is El Capitan.
So you might say just install that, right?
Wrong.
When you try to create a bootable USB installer
on something more modern like a 2017 MacBook Pro,
it'll tell you that El Capitan
will not run on the machine and refuse to create the device.
Apple, if you need a working operating system on a machine
in order to install an operating system
on that same machine, users with faulty drives
on older systems are forced to take their devices
to the genius part.
I am not rolling up to the Guildford Apple store
with this thing.
They hate me enough already.
So we settled on Snow Leopard Server.
It installed fine,
though it still refused to run the installer for El Capitan
because we needed to install software updates.
Software updates wouldn't install
because there was no App Store,
and the Apple website couldn't be accessed
to download the App Store from Safari
because the old version of Safari
doesn't support apple.com's security.
So we had to download Chrome,
to download the App Store, to run the updater,
to run the installer to update the operating system,
and then finally with El Capitan installed,
all the server software was missing.
As it turns out, after Snow Leopard server,
Apple stopped producing
server specific versions of their operating systems,
made the old baked in programs
stop working after the upgrade,
and then they released the OS 10 server suite
as an app in the App Store.
It only costs 20 bucks so no big deal.
Except that they stopped selling it in April of 2022
and we have no way to get it.
We settled then on dual booting so that we can show off
both the latest software and the Xserves features.
Apple, we're not saying you have to support
your old hardware.
But to intentionally make it impossible to use,
that's just plain rude.
OS server. Super cool.
Wait, okay.
So sorry, is this the page?
- Yeah. - Oh. Very cool.
Right out of the box then the web server is running,
and we just have to go to the IP address of the server
that brings us to a portal
for various web services that are available.
Then on the doc,
we've got the default server applications
that set this apart from the regular Snow Leopard
that would've come on your late 2009 MacBook.
Server preferences allows you to change
basic settings for users in groups, file sharing,
which functions the way you would assume
a file sharing server would;
Mail and iCal, which would allow it
to theoretically function
as a replacement for Microsoft Exchange;
iChat, the familiar chat client from the era,
though this time hosted for use within work groups
which allowed organizations to maintain
their own chat logs in-house,
and they could federate with XMPP servers
to allow for chat between members
in different organizations.
It's got Web, which handled the web server
with the UI making it super easy
to implement simple intranet pages;
VPN, which allowed users to connect
using layer two or point-to-point tunneling;
Time Machine, which has the server function
as a storage place for other Macs in the network
to dump their time machine backups;
and Security, which is pretty much just firewall rules.
There are also some icons to see general information,
text logs, and system usage graphs.
All of this stuff looks very Apple so far, right?
In a, yeah, it works,
but it can't be customized much kinda way.
And if that's how you wanna manage your server,
it's kind of a great product
'cause that's how it'll function for you.
But right beside server preferences here
is the server admin button,
and this is the real powerhouse.
This window gives access to much more minute details,
and some other functions that were hidden
from view and preferences for some reason.
Puzzlingly, this is the only way to access things like SMB
for acting as a PC compatible file server,
QuickTime streaming, and podcast producer.
Podcast producer was a pretty cool idea
that allowed networked users
to easily record video podcasts
following workflows that were created beforehand
in podcast composing.
Two cameras could be connected to the server,
and then could be recorded from at once
with the recording process controlled using the web portal,
or the podcast capture application on Mac.
Once the recording was complete,
it would automatically be encoded,
and could even be published automatically
if that's what the workflow called for.
If there were multiple servers in the network
configured through X grid, CPU heavy tasks like encoding
could be offloaded to those servers.
This was probably a pretty great system
to record things like university lectures,
without requiring too much human intervention,
or tying up all the compute power from a single server.
Moving on, there's Work Group manager,
which is exactly what it sounds like;
Podcast Composer, which allowed management of things
like the workflows used in podcast producer;
screen sharing, which worked like most VNC
remote access tools but was Mac specific;
and system image utility.
A super cool tool for creating
customized, network bootable, and installable images
of Snow Leopard.
This could be used to deploy standardized installs
to a lot of computers at once,
or to have networked computers
boot right off of the image on the server.
Considering that this breadth of features
came baked into a server OS
that had an easy to use GUI
with no cost added on top of the hardware,
it's a little surprising that the product
wasn't popular enough to survive,
especially when you account for Windows Servers'
absolutely ridiculous pricing structure.
I mean, not only does Windows Server
cost more than desktop Windows, the client access licenses,
or CALS, mean that you have to pay an additional license fee
for every user who is going to access that server.
Or come to think of it,
maybe that's what makes all of this not surprising at all.
Like any corporation,
Apple's raison d'etre is to make money.
And being a forward-looking company,
Apple would've clearly recognized
that the world was moving
to cloud-based storage and services
rather than locally hosted ones.
So with that in mind, are they better off
trying to bitterly compete and increase
their one-time licensing costs for these bare metal servers?
Or are they better off charging users monthly
to build up their own centralized infrastructure
and subscription based revenue?
Well, I think we all know the answer to that.
But, that doesn't mean the Xserve is totally dead.
There's an active enthusiast community
that is dedicated to keeping these machines in service.
Turning them into personal servers,
budget Mac Pro replacements,
or whatever Frankenstein monstrosities
their little Mac loving minds can come up with.
LTT and Frankenstein monstrosities actually go hand in hand,
and what better way to monstrify something
than to turn it into a formidable gaming machine?
Now unfortunately, we ran into some challenges
getting that going for today,
not the least of which was that we wanted to upgrade
the CPUs for better performance,
and it turns out Apple uses delidded Xeons.
Like, what?
Are they the play it safe fruit company,
or are they a bunch of mad scientist enthusiasts?
I can never tell.
Anyway, let me know in the comments
if you wanna see a follow up.
I think that would be a lot of fun.
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