System Software

The Xserve slot load computer comes with Mac OS X Server installed. The Xserve cluster node computer comes with a restricted user license of Mac OS X Server installed.

This section covers:

Server Software Features
Security Features
Storage Support
Management Support
Computer Feature Identification
Velocity Engine Acceleration

Server Software Features

Here is a list of the key features of the system software on the Xserve computer. For more information, see the Xserve User’s Guide.

• UPS support A UPS vendor can provide a USB connection that connnects their device to the computer’s UPS architecture and works with the Power Manager. The Server Monitor application can communicate with the UPS.


• Auto restart after power failure Xserve hardware supports auto restart after power failure through software control. In the event of a power outage, an Xserve unit detects the return of power and performs an automatic restart.


• Software administration tools The Terminal application in Mac OS X gives you access to a full array of command-line tools for software and system administration. The documentation (“man pages”) for these tools is located in various subdirectories of the /usr directory.


• Software updates The Software Update control panel supports headless selection and installation of updates.


• SNMP Apple’s SNMP stack on Xserve, implemented in Mac OS X Server, allows Xserve to be monitored by standard SNMP management consoles. In addition to the standard SNMP MIBs, Mac OS X Server provides MIBs for its core services. Xserve also provides hardware MIBs for key values. SNMP support is currently read-only.

Security Features

Here are the key security features supported by the system software on the Xserve computer.

• Secure ports Xserve prevents mounting of CDs as well as hot-plugged USB and FireWire hard drives by means of an enclosure lock.


• Secure remote management Xserve’s remote monitoring and management tools run over encrypted links.

Storage Support

Here is a list of the key software features relating to hard disk storage on the Xserve computer.

• Disk utilities tool You can use the filesystem consistency check and interactive repair tool, included with Mac OS X, to work on the Xserve computer’s file system. For more information, launch the Terminal application in Mac OS X and enter the following line after the prompt:

  man fsck



• Remote volume configuration The system software can remotely configure newly mounted volumes.


• USB and FireWire alerts Xserve’s keyswitch security prevents unauthorized hot-plugging and mounting of a USB or FireWire hard drive.

Management Support

Here are some of the management support features of the system software on the Xserve computer.

SNMP Implementation

The SNMP implementation in Mac OS X Server allows the Xserve computer to be monitored by standard SNMP management consoles.

The SNMP implementation on the Xserve is based on the net-snmp protocols. For more information, see the net-snmp page on the World Wide Web at

http://www.net-snmp.com/

Computer Feature Identification

Rather than reading the box flag or the model string and then making assumptions about the computer’s features, applications that need to find out the features of the computer should use IORegistry calls to test for the features they require. IORegistry calls are part of the I/O Kit API. For more information, see the references listed at “I/O Kit”.

Asset management software that reports the kind of computer it is running on can obtain the value of the model property from the device tree root node. The entry banner of the Open Firmware user interface software displays the model property. Or, to display the model property from within the Open Firmware user interface, type the following to display the model property:

0 > dev / 0 > .properties

The "dev /" selects the root device and ".properties" displays all properties of the device selected.

For both slot load and cluster node Xserve computers, the value of the model property is RackMac1,2.

Velocity Engine Acceleration

The Velocity Engine (an implementation of AltiVec) is the vector processing unit in the PowerPC G4 microprocessor. Some system software has been modified to take advantage of the accelerated processing that the Velocity Engine makes possible. System software has also been modified to support low-level operations using the Velocity Engine.

For complete information on the Velocity Engine, refer to the following Apple websites:

http://developer.apple.com/hardwaredrivers/ve/index.html

and

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/vDSP/vDSP_Library.pdf