> most of the time I diverged from using the GUI to administer things I shot myself in the foot
This is something you hopefully learned early or were told by an more experienced Mac admin— configuring, let alone automating, Xserves from a CLI is an exercise in futility as so many components system have been rewritten to do things "the Apple Way."
This is something you hopefully learned early or were told by an more experienced Mac admin— configuring, let alone automating, Xserves from a CLI is an exercise in futility as so many components system have been rewritten to do things "the Apple Way."