Mac OS X in a Nutshell

The Machines Directory

As noted earlier in Section 12.5, the /machines directories within a NetInfo hierarchy play a special role in defining it. They describe the domains that make up a NetInfo hierarchy by mapping machines to the domains that they host.

Figure 12-6. A local domain’s /machines directory

A /machines directory contains one subdirectory for every machine (a single computer somewhere on the visible network) that it defines. Figure 12-6 shows an example as seen in NetInfo Manager, with the localhost subdirectory selected. (Every Mac’s local NetInfo database should contain /machines/localhost, as it defines the local machine’s role in hosting its own NetInfo domain.)

Along with the name and address properties that make each such subdirectory work similarly to a line in the old Unix /etc/hosts config file, each of these machine-specific directories contains a serves property, whose value indicates the NetInfo domain hosted on this machine. In Figure 12-6, we can see that the machine called localhost serves the domain tagged local.