I’ve spent a few weeks now with the new Xserves (I’m going to put them physically into the data center tomorrow BTW).

For the most part, Mac OS X Server 10.3 is a very nice server platform (especially when you are using Xserves). But maybe someone at Apple will read my little wish list, so here goes…

• Make a system-wide shutdown script option. There is a bug in MySQL that prevent the mysqld process from shutting down with the normal kill function, so you end up with corrupt databases on a reboot or shutdown. This could be prevented with a shutdown script that shutdown the mysqld process with mysqladmin.
• Actually USE the shutdown scripts in /Library/StartupItems/ (this could also solve the mysqld problem).
• Server Monitor application should be able to monitor the health of the disk RAID when using hardware RAID (not just software RAID). I wrote a cron job that runs every 5 minutes to do this, but still… it should be standard I think.
• Something should notify me about high loads on the server. I wrote a cron job that runs every 5 minutes to do this as well, but still… it should also be standard I think.
• IP Failover is nice, but if the backup machine doesn’t give back the primary IP fast enough when it comes back online, you end up with NEITHER server utilizing that IP address. I run a script to do some clean-up before it relinquishes the IP address, which can take a little bit. The primary machine thinks another machine as the IP, and stops checking to see if it will give it up at some point. I solved this by making a script that executes after the IP is relinquished, that essentially shuts off the Ethernet port on the master, then turns it back on. This one could be catastrophic if you just assume it took back it’s IP address.
• Give me an API to the Server Admin application. Would be nice to get the nifty graphs and stuff for MySQL transactions for example.