On 14 Mar 2006, at 05:19, Ronald C.F. Antony wrote:
On 13 Mar 2006, at 23:36, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
Like Marc already said - if you want to centralize this
information, you should make one of these machines an LDAP server
and bind the other to it. Netinfo is deprecated and any setups
you build around it will most likely break in Leopard (yes, even
the local netinfo databases are going away).
If they'd make a tool as useful and intuitive as NetInfo Manager,
then maybe LDAP might be palatable, but the way things are, the
mixture of LDAP, flat files, NetInfo, etc. is a mess. I still
remember the NetInfo-only world of NeXTSTEP: it had some minor
issues, but it was a joy to administer (yes, only useful in a
physically trusted environment, etc. but that could have been
fixed...)
I think the main benefit was that you knew there was a "one-stop
shop" for changing such information - netinfo only ever had one
'schema' and because NIM knew how to traverse the NI hierarchy you
could readily discover just where your user(/group/machine/printer)
was being stored. Oh, and niload was more useful than dsimport in
heterogeneous settings, but that's probably just waiting for someone
with time and inclination (as might be DS-aware useradd/userdel/
usermod scripts).
I severely hope that when your Leopard predictions come true its a
complete overhaul that has real tools that properly visualize the
database structures, etc. and isn't just a minor refinement of the
current mess minus NetInfo... I mean, who e.g. even cares to
remember all this LDAP tuple tags? I can't remember these things
for more than two seconds. OTOH, without even trying I still know
where most things should go in NetInfo.
One particular issue with LDAP I find via using workgroup manager et
amici is that there doesn't seem sufficiently strong incentive for
anyone to standardise on a representation of data. For instance,
looking at my own user record with dscl, there are four properties
specifying my home directory and two specifying my user shell. Three
specify my full name and two my web URL. OTOH, if I look at root's
user in NetInfo using dscl everything's specified exactly once as
with flat files, NIS and so on. Despite the cross-platform nature of
LDAP it's actually quite hard to get a bunch of different systems
talking, because as soon as any client wants to write back you have
to guess not only which attributes you need to change but which ones
everyone else expects you to change for them.
Interesting question: in setting up local LDAP[*] on every new Mac,
how many different machines will have the search base "dc=John-
Smith's-PowerBook-G4-15\",dc=local"? Will that ever matter?
[*]ignore any "it's just a wire protocol, you mean hierarchical
databases presented via LDAP" comments ;-)
And please: no more convoluted tools like Workgroup Manager!
*grrr...*
Cheers,
Graham.
--
Graham Lee GPG Key ID: 01D5B9D8
UNIX Systems Manager,
Oxford Physics Practical Course
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~wadh1342 01865 273450
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