Though I have seen Macs in use at ISPs (ie. for running DNS servers via
QuickDNS, etc.) and as Web servers (at Web hosting companies) my
experience as a Mac user (running MacOS System 6 and 7) has been that
they are not very reliable -- because of the lack of pre-emptive
multitasking a Mac will often hang and because of the lack of memory
protection between processes (and the OS) a Mac will often crash and
burn. This will happen to me usually at least once a day, especially
if running multiple non-trivial applications such as Netscape with Java
and the Real (Audio/Video) player. Often the Mac system software on
disk has gotten into such a state that the machine will no longer
run reliably or even boot -- necessitating a re-install of MacOS.
Though it could be made fairly secure (from the remote network)
I wouldn't want to use a Mac for a high capacity/usage production server
because the server process or the Mac itself might crash during the
night and stay down until morning. Unix and NT machines -- though
more likely to be broken into -- are more reliable at keeping server
processes up and running (they can even babysit them and restart them
if necessary).
- Morrow
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