Marta, LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. What does it mean? What does it do? Is it important to you? Does it have a cousin? Is he/she married? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop? Get ready... When you create a person on Mac OS X, such as when you install it, the person has a long name, short name, password, cute little picture, home folder with other folders inside it, and other goodies you can't see. We shall call this "authentication information", even though it contains more that what we need. Every time you log into Mac OS X, the operating system must check your short or long name against your password so you can see all your stuff and do things. The long name, short name, password, and all that other stuff I mentioned are kept in a database in the innards of your operating system. When you use Mac OS X at home or at work or at the beach, chances are good that you are "authenticating" your name and password against this "local" database that I mentioned. This local database keeps track of all that stuff in a certain "language". The language of Mac OS X's database right now is called NetInfo. So you are authenticating against your local NetInfo database at home when you log in. Now, let's say you had to manage 20 computers in a school or college computer lab. When the students come in, they may not sit at the same physical location day after day (the other students probably smell). But what if they stored all their files on the computer in front of them? Now what? Enter Mac OS X Server. A Mac OS X Server can have a NetInfo "parent" database that has all the student's long names, short names, passwords, home folders, pictures, etc... You as the person in charge of the room tell each Mac OS X computer in the lab to look at the "parent" instead of itself. That way, students are free to move around the room and when they log into a Mac OS X computer, they are actually "authenticating" against the "parent" so their home folders are actually on the Mac OS X Server. This is the best way to handle a large lab. But say you were in charge of the lab and you went to your boss and said, "I would like a Mac OS X Server to set up a parent NetInfo database to allow all our students to log in from any computer in the lab and get their work. I would also like beer for lunch on Wednesday from now on. Oh and try breath mints once and a while." Your boss might say, "Well Marta, if that IS your real name and not an acronym of a transit line somewhere in the US, we already HAVE an LDAP server to authenticate all our Windows machines so, NO Server for you! Too bad your Mac OS X client machines can't authenticate to our LDAP server. Macs are lame-HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!! But I will consider the beer and it's NOT my breath, thank you, I have a gas problem." You might respond, "Boss, Mac OS X clients CAN authenticate against an LDAP server just like they can against a NetInfo parent, same idea. Macs speak the LDAP language. They just need to be set up properly to pass on the syntax and the property tax, not to mention the sales tax. Oh and about the beer and the other thing, thank you and you are gross. Now go away and manage something". So you see Marta, LDAP is a way for a computer to get authentication information from another bigger computer somewhere in an X Files episode, the same way it gets its information now from its local NetInfo database.
Life is good now-go take some Ritalin and lie down. :) Schoun On Wednesday, June 11, 2003, at 10:51 AM, Marta Edie wrote: > Cvould somebody enlighten me what this shortcut stands for and what it > does. I keep coming across this a lot recently > Marta > Heinzelm?nnchenk?nigin A.D. > > > | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will > | be June 24. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. > | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be June 24. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
