“Small office, large office, home office, school, home user… unless you’re in IT it’s unlikely you’ve given much thought to setting up Apple’s Server app,” Jeffery Battersby reports for Macworld. “In fact, maybe even if you’re in IT you haven’t given it much thought because, well, why? You’re already running Windows servers, right?”
“With the proliferation of Mac and iOS devices in every corner of your home and office, you may have no idea just how much of your Internet bandwidth is being used to download content from Apple’s servers,” Battersby reports. “A caching server can help you make sure all your devices are up to date while leaving your Internet bandwidth almost untouched.”
Battersby reports, “Practically speaking, is that instead of making all the Mac and iOS devices in your network run out over the Internet to download and update content from Apple’s servers, you can host those updates on your servers, which makes for faster updates and less external bandwidth usage.”
Much more in the full article here.
Done!
Users should not be afraid of Mac’s server software. It is bonehead easy to use. While I have not turned on the caching server service, I will when I get home.
Another good use of the server app is for Time Machine backups of multiple Macs if you don’t have Time Capsule. All you need is an external hard disk connected to one of your Macs. The server Time Machine app then allow backups of all the Macs in your house using a single external drive.