NetInfo Manager

NetInfo Manager

Developer(s)	Apple Computer
Stable release	1.4
Operating system	Mac OS X
Type	Networking
Website	Apple – Mac OS X

NetInfo Manager is a Mac OS X application to manage the built-in Mac OS X UNIX directory system.

It is found in /Applications/Utilities/NetInfo Manager.app in Mac OS X versions 10.0 through 10.4.11 but it has been removed in Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard". In 10.5, the functions typically previously associated with NetInfo Manager have been moved to the Directory Utility application, and the Accounts pane of System Preferences. (In addition, the nicl NetInfo command line utility has been replaced with dscl command.)

Background

All versions of Mac OS X have used Netinfo (until Leopard 10.5). Netinfo was historically used by NextStep as an OS configuration database. The major uses for netinfo were as an alternate configuration database for the /etc files. Users, groups, host entries and file system mount records have historically been stored in plain text files that are read/write root-only, and read world for everyone else. The netinfo database on Mac OS X was typically stored in /var/db/netinfo/local.nidb/, though much of the information in the database could be presented in the style of /etc files using the nidump command. For example nidump passwd would produce output in the colon separated format of /etc/passwd.

As of Leopard all contents of this file have migrated to /var/db/dslocal – each NetInfo record is now a .plist (an XML structure for representing structured data commonly used on the Mac OS X platform). For example a user record named "admin" and its contents can be found at /var/db/dslocal/nodes/default/users/admin.plist. To the trained eye you will see the contents of this .plist file represent the common posix user information plus some information unique to Mac OS X. Groups can similarly be found at /var/db/dslocal/nodes/default/groups, other record types follow the "default" portion of that file path.

NetInfo Manager was historically used by end users to modify the contents of the NetInfo database for operations such as changing a user's shell attribute, managing groups, enabling the root user, editing filesystem mount records, and host records. All of these operations can be accomplished with Leopard using new and existing tools provided with the OS.

Methods for editing users attributes on Mac OS X Leopard (user shell, uid, primary gid, home directory path)

• command line: dscl (Panther, Tiger, Leopard)
• System Preferences:Accounts Pane – unlock the accounts pane – right-click/control-click on a user account – pop-up menu "advanced" – this panel will let you edit user attributes.

Note: you may need to reboot after changing this sort of information, or run 'dscacheutil -flushcache' from the command line.

Methods for adding file system mount records on Leopard

• edit /etc/fstab
• Launch Directory Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Directory Utility) – click show advanced settings – click on mounts in the tool bar
• command line: dscl can be used to manage mount records in the new dslocal database

Methods for adding host records on Leopard

• edit /etc/hosts
• command line: dscl can be used to manage host records in the new dslocal database
• documented method using dscl can be found here [1]

Methods for managing group records on Leopard

• command line: dseditgroup – man dseditgroup for more information (Tiger, Leopard)
• System Preferences:Accounts Pane – unlock the accounts pane – click the "plus" button – in the pop-up menu you can choose "group"

It is not recommended that you edit groups using dscl – because while possible the group schema on Mac OS X is quite complex and hard to manage manually via a tool such as dscl.

Other tools of interest for editing directory information on Leopard include:

• dscl
• dsimport
• dsexport
• dscacheutil
• dsmemberutil
• dseditgroup
• dsenableroot
• ping
• id
• groups
• pwpolicy
• passwd
• cmmnd

External links

• Understanding and Using NetInfo
• How-to: Understanding Mac OS X Open Directory
• Analysis of the Demise of Netinfo