Part II. Directory Services
In recent years, IT and the way that IT organizations deal with users, groups and other administrative data has changed markedly. Workgroup management has become centralized, so that user accounts and authentication data are managed on a server, rather than individually on each workstation. This concept, commonly called a directory service, or a domain, was first commercialized in the desktop market by Novell and later embraced by Microsoft.
Directory domains fit nicely with the ongoing trend of centralization in the IT industry, and have been widely adopted in the marketplace. Vendors from Microsoft to Apple to Novell to Sun have brought forward a number of directory products, and they are so important to Mac OS X that I’ve devoted several chapters to them. This section of the book begins with a conceptual analysis of shared directory domains and moves quickly into chapters covering specific aspects of Apple’s server-side directory service offerings. Chapters in this part of the book include:
| Chapter 6, Open Directory Server |
| Chapter 7, Identification and Authorization in Open Directory Server |
| Chapter 8, Authentication in Open Directory Server |
| Chapter 9, Replication in Open Directory Server |
Additional information regarding the client-side Directory Services architecture employed by Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server is located in Appendix A.
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