On Sunday, November 24, 2002, at 11:33 AM, Chris Devers wrote:
In general, the philosophical split is between OS X Server and OS X Client.On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Ken Williams wrote:The rumors I saw when Jaguar was about to come out suggested that NetInfoOn Friday, November 22, 2002, at 10:42 AM, Gary Blackburn wrote:There's a good discussion on plists and Netinfo, but the book also says that Netinfo is going away in favor of traditional /etc filesWhat? I thought NetInfo was supposed to be a step forward, and that people liked it. It's really going away?
was to be superceded by some kind of LDAP based network configurable
directory system, similar in some ways to what NI already does, but "more
standards based" or something.
As other discussion in this thread suggests, traditional /etc files seem
to have been given more prominence as well.
Long term though, my impression was that the ideas that make NetInfo a
good idea aren't being abandoned, but they're going to be reimplemented in
a way that will play more nicely with any existing LDAP tools...
In practice, the only place I've seen this so far is the new LDAP based
global address book system, which really is just a directory. I haven't
yet seen any indication that system configuration is moving into LDAP, but
like I say, my understanding is that this is where things will go with
future releases.
The problem is that the needs of a professionally-administered, multi-user Server are very different from the needs of a stand-alone desktop system, or even from those of a small workgroup server.
On the Server side, many of us have been advocating BOTH more "unix standard" abilities for "system configuration" and the "user control" for quite some time now -- mainly because that is the market that xServer competes in. The server issue revolves around the fact that Netinfo is very difficult to maintain and administer when you have any kind of "large" and especially, dynamic user base. It also makes porting contemporary Unix code (ie code newer than the NeXT system) to make use of Netinfo a real pain. The problem is not unlike that of Tru64 Unix's SIA security and accounting interface... it is excellent and many contend far superior to the PAM interface -- but nobody writing Unix code out there uses it. You have to have some one who is expert in both the particular code AND the Netinfo or SIA interface do the port, simply because there are usually philosophical assumptions made that are incompatible with simply "changing the calls." (Not to mention the fact the there is usually far more information in the Netinfo or SIA databases than is used simply because the PAM code was written for the lowest-common denominator. You wind up having to make extreme logic modifications to the code to utilize these "non-standard" features.)
Consequently, the 10.2 release has "finally allowed" the use of traditional Unix configuration files AND the use of "other," non-Mac based, authentication and authorization servers from Kerberos to LDAP. OS X Server, no longer requires that all its users exist in a "local" Netinfo database. This is a big win simply because it means that OS X can trivially play in a non-Mac world... without requiring that you duplicate information in such a way that it is available exclusively to the Mac users... ie a Netinfo database.
For the single user or small, all Mac, workgroup situation, a Netinfo database can (and usually will be) still used to administer those systems - with all of the attendant problems and complaints about having to re-build from scratch when some kind of "unexpected" event occurs because one does not have the requisite ability to deal with netinfo on a command line basis. But even the small workgroup only works when it is non-homogenous -- that is, if it also includes Windows or Unix clients, they can't deal with Netinfo easily, if they can deal with it at all.
Like AppleTalk, Netinfo is effectively a proprietary environment -- Apple is the only one using it. And the simple fact is, the best technology rarely wins -- the best marketing does. Netinfo has a miniscule mind-share (forget about market share) in the Unix world, LDAP has it beat seven ways from Tuesday.
Personally, I would expect that, like LocalTalk, Netinfo's days are numbered, possibly still in years, but numbered, none the less. Meanwhile, it will co-exist with other schemes, but being relied upon less and less.
An additional side-effect of the move away from REQUIRING an understanding of Netinfo is that non Mac OS X Unix (or Liunx) people can quickly "come up to speed" without being immediately confronted by something which is truly foreign to their way of life!
T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
# Beige G3 - Rev A motherboard - 768 Meg -10.2.2 Server
# Flat-panel iMac (2.1) 800MHz - Super Drive - 768 Meg - 10.2.2 client
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