When you blew last year’s budget on a brand new SAN, its potential seemed second only to its simplicity: As demand grows, add capacity from a huge storage pool, and never have to worry about individual hard drives again. When you increase the allocation to the Mac share, however, your workstations still see the same amount of space. Unlike Leopard, Mac OS X 10.4 can’t natively or dynamically increase partition size, and no version of Apple’s Disk Utility can resize NTFS or Linux partitions.

It’s the middle of a sleepy summer afternoon, when suddenly that dual-T1 you fought so hard for feels like dial-up. Apple’s released another OS update, and now each and every Macintosh in the company is trying to suck down several hundred megabytes of “improved performance and stability”. To make matters worse, this is brand-new software, untested in your environment and released just minutes before. If it breaks essential workflow or impacts network functionality, there’s no uninstall or roll-back feature built into OS X.

Anyone who’s ever worked the help desk knows how easily people can forget their account credentials. In a managed environment, it just takes a couple of mouse clicks and the problem is solved. In a workgroup where machines were set up independently (and often by their users), locking out the only administrative user could mean wasting hours migrating user data to an entirely new installation.