OS X Server vs Darwin Calendar Server and my first DCS installation
Can someone list the pros and cons of using DCS versus using the built in calender server on OS X Server on Snow Leopard? Or are they the same source perhaps? I am looking for basic family based calendar serving and sharing, simple stuff. I did get trunk working last night. Quite easy really. The details you enter into iCal were a bit tricky to discover, but once past that, it did seem to work. My limitations were not knowing where to deal with adding users and setting their permissions, but I also did not dig into it in any significant way. One thing I noticed, is I synced the default admin account with a local mac and an iPhone as my test case. Changes and additions to the local mac, importing of pre-existing calendars etc, all worked flawlessly and fast. Making a change on iPhone and syncing, with a forced refresh in iCal on the desktop, propogated on refresh. iPhone on the other hand did not. I am not seeing any way in calendar on iPhone to force a refresh. Eventually the changes make their way, what defines this? Does DCS support push notifications out to iPhones? I added attendees which made it to all clients eventually, however, iPhone also did not recognize them as existing users in my address book, though they were there. Names showed as "uid:user" or something to that effect. (that literal string) Attached files were not anywhere obvious in iPhone either. All other fields seemed to have parity. This was with a trunk snapshot from last night. Are my issues 3.x related, or am I missing something obvious? On DCS, when an alert is set to notify via email, does this rely on the local MTA on the DCS machine, or is there an in built mailer I will need to SMTP authenticate with, or is the client responsible for the mail notifications? For alerts, on remote clients such as iPhone, anything special I need to set up, or is making sure a reasonable refresh rate is defined in iCal sufficient? I've tried a lot of ways to do this, the gmail middleman dance, looked at busycal, some php messes, and a few more. My first try a few weeks ago was DCS, but I never could get iCal to talk to it. Which was just needing the URL to have the URI bits attached. Maybe the wiki could use some edits there? Can I make such edits, or is that private? If the answer is that OS X Server is the same, I may go that way for integration simplicity. If not, I'd like to start work on a MacPorts Portfile for DCS. Has any effort into a MacPorts Portfile been made in the past, seems I must be missing it, being in the same "forge" and all :) MacPorts likes to sandbox to it's own prefix very strongly, perhaps that, meaning a full blown new python install and source modification to all paths has something to do with the port never being made. I am betting every -s bit is going to need touching by MacPorts as well. Any past history with regard to MacPorts and DCS would be appreciated. Thanks all. -- Scott Iphone says hello.
On 21 Nov 2009, at 22:53, Scott Haneda wrote:
Can someone list the pros and cons of using DCS versus using the built in calender server on OS X Server on Snow Leopard?
Or are they the same source perhaps? ... If the answer is that OS X Server is the same, I may go that way for integration simplicity. If not, I'd like to start work on a MacPorts Portfile for DCS.
My understanding is that the DCS in OS X Server is the same as that at calendarserver.org, BUT the version in OS X Server is a nice stable release and its shipped with some nice GUI management utilities (which are unavailable for the source version). DCS at calendarserver.org can run on Linux, or on Mac OS X if you can't afford the server version of OS X. If you have access to OS X Server I don't see why you'd install it manually from calendarserver.org instead. My opinion / perception: the calendarserver.org version would be great for Linux users / sys admins if someone packaged it properly, but that's obviously not something that Apple are interested in providing. I believe there may be some Debian packages, but I don't know how good they are. I'm not really clear WHY Apple provide the calendarserver.org open-source version, because it seems fairly clearly like it's not intended to be an easy solution for end users, and all I read here is of people having pain with it. I would be glad to be corrected by other list members if I've misunderstood the situation. Stroller.
On Nov 21, 2009, at 6:21 PM, Stroller wrote:
My opinion / perception: the calendarserver.org version would be great for Linux users / sys admins if someone packaged it properly, but that's obviously not something that Apple are interested in providing. I believe there may be some Debian packages, but I don't know how good they are.
FWIW, I had a pre-existing debian-based server in my house, and I use the debian calendar server packages. They work just fine, and I sync all my macs and two iphones to it. When I started using it, it was not easy to set up distinct users in the cal server without using LDAP or some directory service, and that was too complicated for my purposes. So, instead, I created one user, and several calendars under that user, with each person in the family having a calendar. Yes, that means that everybody in the family can edit anybody else's calendar, but that's okay for now.
I'm not really clear WHY Apple provide the calendarserver.org open- source version, because it seems fairly clearly like it's not intended to be an easy solution for end users, and all I read here is of people having pain with it.
I can't speak for their motivation, but I'm certainly pleased that they provide it. --- Chris Cleeland
participants (3)
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Chris Cleeland
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Scott Haneda
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Stroller