macOS Server App Reviews

This update killed my server install, Profile Manager will no longer run with the usual obscure errors. At first I couldn’t even connect to the server manager until the computer was restarted.

This update killed our Profile Manager and corrupted the database. It also caused Profile Manager to run slow and give error messages when attempting to make any changes.

I have several local Web sites written in PHP which were disabled by this update. Also, my local self-signed SSL cert no longer works with apache. This update has completely disabled my ability to work with this software. I’m currently looking for an alternative piece of software that I can use in the mean time.

Ver 5.0.3 messed up web hosting on my system. Why did I go for this upgrade I will never know. Ver 4 was soo good, so reliabe and consistent. I wish they had ZERO stars rating as even 1 is too high. This version works ONLY if you do a brand new install, as if NEVER used it before.

Do not download. How can we roll back to 4.1.3? Anyone willing to host a copy so we can bring our servers back online? Fix this apple asap…

Echoing others, all of the websites I hosted on my OS X Server became completely unreachable. I couldn’t even reach them from the machine that was running Server, although the Website service indicated that everything was running well. Web serving wasn’t broken, until this version “fixed” it. I tried restarting the service, and then re-booting my Mac, several times. I thought that something must have started or stopped out of sequence since I didn’t see any notable errors in the logs. None of this worked. As I started writing this review, I tried one last ditch effort. I went back and re-installed Server 5.0.3 from the App Store. I was actually surprised that it gave me the “Install” option. I can now get to all of my websites again, and they now appear to be reachable from outside my LAN. I was going to give this one star, because of my last two days of frustration in trying to will my websites to work by toggling every switch and trying every incantation I could of stopping and starting tangentially related services on my server and my router. The upgrade to two stars is because it is now working for me and only because I haven’t been able to tell if any other surprises are still in store. I am now convinced that my original install was incomplete or corrupted, but I never got an error message stating as much. The only anomaly on the upgrade that I can recall, is that the installer asked me to quit the Server app for the upgrade. It is quite possible that something did not finish quitting before the install proceeded. If you plan on taking the plunge, make sure to quit the Server app, and then wait a minute or two before starting the upgrade.

I’ve emailed less polite feeback to Apple. The gist of my issues with Server 5.0.3 have to do with Apache web service. It’s really hard to mess up Apache, but Apple has managed to do so. Apple’s Service Proxy hijacks all port 80 and 443 traffic, making ALL web access logs show ALL web traffic as 127.0.0.1. You can NO LONGER tell who is accessing your website. Additionally, if you use WordPress Jetpack’s Admin ACL (restricting admin access by IP), this now breaks, and you will LOSE ACCESS TO YOUR WORDPRESS ADMIN MODULE. There’s probably more that’s broken, those are the things I’ve spent my morning fighting after this upgrade. I have uninstalled Server 5.0.3, and will be building my own server bits to replace it. This is far from the first time I’ve had an issue after a Server.app upgrade, and I know it is far from the last one. This app has gotten worse with each upgrade. It’s a shame, it used to be good.

Update 5.0.3 broke everything related to websites, but luckily Apple released 5.0.4 which resolves all those problems! Definitely update if you want to be able to use any web-related services! Thank you Apple for fixing this major issue!

Everything works fine, but all my Webdav connections to other aplicatons are broken, please fix it. I got some key apps which require that connection through file sharing.

Frustratingly, I can’t make the main feature I wanted it for - Jabber messaging host - work. No combination of settings seem to function. An out-of-the-box feature doesn’t work with the Jabber client built into OS X’s own Messages client, making what should be a turnkey solution for messaging on my home network inoperative! I can’t make the iOS file sharing work because the iPad refuses to connect to the server. Both iOS File Sharing and Messages both tell me that my account information is incorrect. I’ve even tried creating a test account that’s got a dead simple name and password, and it makes no difference. Something in here is borked. Maybe the .1 release will make it function :D

Like many others, I am caught by the reverse proxy changes to Apache. My main website doesn’t work properly, my users cannot get in password protected web folders, and we have no wiki. This is particularly bad since none of the Apache changes are documented in the What’s New for this version of the app. I didn’t think I would have to make babysitting a web server a full time job but this version is poorly implimented.

I too upgraded to 3.2.2. It worked perfect. It also stated it supported iOS8 and Yosemite. It does not. After the upgrade to Yosemite and $20 later for Server 4.0, half of my users were dead in the water. As the admin my account was corrupted and I could not get any of my passwords to work. Therefore none of my computers / iPads / iPhones / calendars etc. would sync. In short the entire server came crashing down… Used Time Capsule backup to restore… 5 hours late all is good Apple please warn us of fees for software that doesn’t work. This has been an ongoing issue since 10.6. I do not have time to play with these issues everytime there is an update. Now I have server software that I can’t use and need to experiment with the entire system before it goes online again. I need to send Apple an invoice for my time wasted. Update 9/24/2015… Same bad issues with every single change to the server software. Spent 2 hour on the phone a week ago to fix issue and now there are more issues.

C’mon. Among the many intelligent reviews below/above, give us an actually secure, modern connection using 1.2 (or gasp, leaps and bounds ECDSA). We know our customers so we can require what we want. Upgrade apache too (or allow for modern-day linux), give a reliable database option since you’ve done away with MySQL that’s easily connected within services Postgresql, etc. You’re all about making devices with ever-new app stores so why not make this like AWS, Azure, etc and give us a system services App Store that actually work to either use open source, docker container, PAY FOR, etc. Give ability for a new database service to be run securely with aforementioned each service instance to website. Get on it. Please. People are moving to BYOS and the infiltration of SaaS as a crony way to hold our data for ransom so why not give us a reliable, Mac solution, please. Thank you. Also, with this new version, every time the server restarts I have to redo host name to same name to get all sites to work. …geeezzzzz Future feature: via eff >>LetsEncrypt is a Python-based utility that works alongside Apache to automatically obtain a certificate and convert a website to HTTPS.

I’m running two SSL Servers on different IP addresses. Now the only way my server will serve app on my secondary IP address is if I have HTTP enabled as well… then I end up with too many redirects. This one is definately a fail Apple! I made the move to OS X from Linux because I was tired of being a system administrator whenever a new patch came out… feels like I’m back running Linux.

This Update 5.0.4 is aweful. It busted my PHP site, and becuse it puts all sites behind a proxy, I can no longer hit my sites correctly on port 80 or 443 they’re now in 30450 or something weird like that… totally broke my apps that looked for port 80 and 443 on my clent machines… Thank goodness Time Machine was able to roll back to server 4… HOWEVER doing this messed up my profile manager so I had to re-enroll all my cleients in that as well… proceed with caution friends… maybe run your stuff in a virutal environment before making apple osx server updates live… Apple Please document stuff like this better or better yet, don’t break our web servers with wierd proxies….

This update to OS X Server seems like it would have some nice features, but it has broken Webdav authentication (logins are claimed to be incorrect) and the new IOS Mac OS X Server account connections don’t work- the two are likely related. Log files are giving little/no indication what the issue might be.

I don’t run a company on OS X Server, but I’ve been hosting my personal Mail, Calendars, Reminders, Notes, etc. for years to very good results. With every release, Server makes very good default decisions, which making setup just stupid-simple. And, when I’ve wanted to learn something, I’ve been able to dig in to the details without fear of hosing everything. Complete aside - My hope is that Server eventually turns into a self-hosted iCloud alternative.

I upgraded my Mac OS X Server Yosemite to El Capitan. Now when I try to connect to the server it just hangs saying the server will be updated. Don’t really see any activity running in top on the command line. I was told the upgrade was free etc. So, the update is not going smooth for me in this case. Mainly using product for continuous integration with Xcode which seemed to work fine before.

I had version 4 running, after having to reinstall the whole OS to get it working. It was perfect! I debated upgrading to 5, but since it works with both Yosemite and El capital, I held my breath and did it. Poor choice. Server not working. Not even locally... I’ll have to work on the weekend to find out what the heck happened. I wish I had one upgrade that did not destroy my server

I got this mostly for the caching. We have multiple iOS devices and Macs. I wish it would look at my Apps in iTunes and predownload those updates into the cache. Then when I update it would grab from the cache. I don’t think it does that, I think it caches for a device when one device downloads it and then when the next device downloads it, it is already there. It has promise. I like iCloud, but I don’t think it is caching my photos. I like to view the photos on my Apple TV, but it doesn’t feel like the photos that are on my laptop hard drive are in the cache, it would be nice if they were so rather than another laptop looking to the cloud it would just look to the cache.