[KLUG Members] NFS across platforms...and not!

[Adam Williams]

> The article is interesting in that it mentions having to update
> NetInfo.  I run into netinfo stuff alot in researching LDAP related
> items.  Apple's netinfo seems a conglomeration of NSS, NSCD, and
> OpenLDAP;  they must have expanded it's functionality if it now has
> something to do with NFS exports.
> BTW, the Apple NetInfo people have contributed patches (and some nice
> ones at that) back to OpenLDAP.  So kudos to them.
> Is slapd running on a Mac OS X server and client?

Ah, here is an explanation of the situation (from the OpenRADIUS
website).  Apparently Apple's got some Next-ian baggage in OS/X and has
a rather Microsoft-ian approach to standards in this regard.

"Mac OSX Server 10.2 (aka Jaguar) has built-in LDAP server
functionality.  It's not a real LDAP server, but instead it's an LDAP
interface to the Mac OS Server's authentication system.  Jaguar uses
NetInfo, which is a left-over from the NeXT days.  NetInfo was (and
still is) a parallel to LDAP, and was based on X.500 just like LDAP. 
But the implementation isn't quite compatible with LDAP.
So Apple has written a set of API's called OpenDirectory, which is Apple's 
new way of handling directories and authentication between applications.
Apple's LDAP installation is a front-end only, and it uses OpenDirectory
API to access the NetInfo directory.  Ya got all that?"

PADL's got a nice HOWTO on how to make something more resembling real LDAP available on Mac OS/X -
http://www.padl.com/Articles/AdvancedOpenDirectoryConf.html