Mac OS X Tiger in a Nutshell

Understanding Directory Services

In Mac OS X 10.1.x and earlier, the system was configured to consult the NetInfo database for all directory information. If you needed to do something simple, such as adding a host, you couldn’t just add it to /etc/hosts and be done with it. Instead, you had to use the NetInfo Manager (or NetInfo’s command-line utilities) to add the host to the system.

However, as of Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), NetInfo functions started to become more of a legacy protocol and were reduced to handling the local directory database for machines that did not participate in a network-wide directory, such as Active Directory or OpenLDAP. NetInfo is still present in Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4, but you can perform many configuration tasks by editing the standard Unix flat files. By default, Mac OS X is now configured to consult the local directory (also known as the NetInfo database) for authentication, which corresponds to /etc/passwd and /etc/group on other Unix systems. You can override this setting with the Directory Access application . For more information, see "Configuring Directory Services,” later in this chapter.

For users whose network configuration consists of an IP address, a default gateway, and some DNS addresses, this default configuration should be fine. You’ll need to tap into Open Directory ’s features for more advanced configurations, such as determining how a user can log into a workstation and find his home directory, even when that directory is hosted on a ...