Don Crabb has put his most recent Apple pet peeve-- no six-slot G3 Macs available, none planned-- on the back burner, it seems, and has a new crusade to fight, as outlined in his latest MacCentral article. This time, the Crabb is miffed that Apple doesn't have an operating system that works well in a corporate environment. By that, he means that the Mac OS is not capable of booting off a server via the local network, which is indeed a nifty feature that would reduce the hair-greying rate of countless Mac system administrators the world over. The benefits of such a capability are obvious: imagine you're the sysadmin at a medium-sized company with 100 Macs. Now imagine that you have to upgrade the version of FileMaker Pro on every single one of those machines. Sure, you can buy software like NetOctopus to make such a task a whole lot easier, but wouldn't it be great just to upgrade the application an a single server and have all 100 users ready to rock with their own preferences and templates?

Similarly, say one machine spontaneously combusts. With a cluster of net-booting Macs in place, the poor user with the singed eyebrows can simply move to another desk, boot into their own login environment, and continue working exactly as if he/she were still seated at his/her own desk. And getting the fried system replaced can be done in record time; just kick the charred one off the desk and plug a new one into its place. No restoring from backup, no swapping hard disks, none of that nonsense because everything's still on the server, safe and sound.

Yes, there are software packages that let you set up a Mac cluster with similar functionality, but it's just not the same as having a true net-booting Mac. But Don might have missed the rumors floatng around the 'net that the iMac, Apple's cuddly new consumer toy, is in fact the long-fabled Mac NC, with a few tweaks thrown in to make it more palatable as a stand-alone consumer unit. That coincides nicely with the rumor that the iMac is in fact already physically capable of booting off a Rhapsody (whoops, we mean Mac OS X Server) box. Which means that the iMac coupled with Mac OS X Server may in fact be one seriously tempting business combination. All we need to do is wait and see if Apple announces a bMac: make it an iMac without the modem and perhaps with a slightly more "businesslike" color scheme (though we certainly hope not). Keep your fingers crossed.