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Macintosh OS X Client Setup
This section is to help you in setting up your Mac OS X clients to work with the system. It is quite easy to set up the OS X clients, assuming that you are using OS X 10.2 or higher. In previous versions of the OS it is quite difficult. In fact, we spent about two weeks trying to get the system to work with 10.1.5, and gave up. When we got ahold of 10.2 it was VERY simple. Apparantly Apple did a good job implementing LDAP in the OS.
Now for a little quick background info. OS X does not deal with users, groups, passwords, and all those type thing like most *nix systems do. The flat files do exist, such as /etc/passwd, however those files are not used. Instead, OS X uses the leftoever system from NextStep, called NetInfo. NetInfo is a database system, quite similar to LDAP. All users, groups, passwords, and lots of other information are handled in the NetInfo database.
NOTE:
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Be careful with the NetInfo Database if you do not know what you are doing. This is a really easy way to mess up your whole computer. Trivial mistakes in the NetInfo Database can cause the machine to not boot up or not be able to login.
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As a quick side note, I heard an interview with a OS X team lead at Apple where he said that Apple is going to do away with NetInfo and migrate to an all LDAP system in the near future. This would be an awesome move, and should make this system all work that much better and easier.
For the rest of the OS X tutorials, I am assuming that you are familiar with Mac OS X 10.2.x, have the root account enabled, and are comfortable at the command line. For instructions on enabling the root user, click here.
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