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Review of the BSD part of MacOS X Beta
gbooker writes " Deamon News has an interesting article about the BSD core of MacOS X Beta. They talk about how it differs from the traditional MacOS AND how it differs from BSD. This is the first installment of what could be an interesting series."
The author of the article has probably never touched a NeXT system (or a PC, SPARC, or HP box running OpenStep). NetInfo is not new, it's over 10 years old and well documented. Properly implemented on a network it makes life soooooo much easier. Please, before you compare NeXTstep/OpenStep/Rhapsody/MacOSX to your favorite flavor of BSD, do some research on NeXTstep and NetInfo. It makes a lot more sense if you have a real interstanding of why things are the way they are.
Try this link for some pointers and URLs:
http://204.214.75.123/next/index.html
> However, if you make changes to your IP address/DNS/etc. settings, you are informed that you must restart for the changes to take effect. Even if this stuff is 'hard-wired' into the NetInfo setup, it should only require a re-HUP of NetInfo for this to change, not a restart.
/etc/syslogd.conf (instead of systlogd) after changing it.
Profound misunderstanding here. Netinfo only holds the information. re-HUP of netinfo make as much sense as saying re-HUP
The reason why a reboot is required is that the various configuration are made at boot time, based on info extracted from the netinfo database. He probably could skip the reboot by relaunching the correct scripts.
The best thing about netinfo is that it is hierarchical, ie: that you can have network-level configuration on a 'master server', whith every little bit customised in your local net-info database.
There exist a port of netinfo for linux. Lost the pointer, but I may dig it up if needed...
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
If you, like most other Internet server admins with a fully-functional brain stem, prefer Unix over the NT kernel, then Mac OS X will be the first true consumer OS that you will ever feel comfortable with.
Come on, do we really need to take cheap shots like this? If you ask me, any "server admin with a fully-functional brain stem" would use the tool that best fits the job, even if that means (gasp) NT. Like it or not, Windows is better for some things. Personally I prefer UNIX systems, but that doesn't mean it should be my way or the highway (perhaps the corniest cliche ever uttered).
Is it just me who's tired of the "My OS can beat up your OS" wars?
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
Hmmm.. So Mac OSX = BSD + Nice GUI. And the article reveals that (modulo freely available dev tools) it's a full BSD port.
So... I can use Linux/BSD + XFree + KDE/Gnome and play the Catchup-with-continuous-development game, or I can get a nice shiny easy to use Mac, get the benefit of (theoretically) 15 yrs worth of legacy Apps, *and* the cutting-edge of Open software fresh from the labs.
Is this is future of UNIX-for-the-masses?
--
I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Slashdot apparently pissed off Apple, they've got /.hidden!
Thimo
--
Avoid the Gates of Hell. Use Linux!
not long ago, a well known rumour site showed a script that was sent to them to restart the network services without having to erboot your machine after such reconfiguration:
- #!/bin/sh
;;
;; /var/run/nibindd.pid` /var/run/lookupd.pid`
This script, when run as root, resets the networking interfaces and services in a very short period of time ( make sure you save this script and chmod 755 and chown it to root.case `whoami` in
root)
*)
echo "Not Administrator (root). You need to be in order to restart the network."
return
esac
echo "Restarting the network, network will be unavailable."
kill `ps aux | grep ipconfigd | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}'`
echo " - Killed 'ipconfigd'."
ipconfigd
echo " - Started 'ipconfigd' right back up."
sleep 1
ipconfig waitall
echo " - Ran 'ipconfig waitall' to re-configure for new settings."
sleep 1
kill -HUP `cat
echo " - Killed 'nibindd' with a HUP (hang up)."
sleep 2
kill -HUP `cat
echo " - Killed 'lookupd' with a HUP (hang up)."
echo "The network has successfully been restarted and/or re-configured and is now available. "
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
excerpt from article:
"The genius of NetInfo is that it provides a uniform way of accessing and manipulating all system and network configuration information."
Maybe I'm missing something, but I fail to see any ingenuity here. Granted, these guys are good enough to admit they aren't hard-core, old-school sysadmins, but still... NIS/NIS+ have been answering this question for years now. Despite any failings you might cite about yp, netinfo hardly seems like an improvement.
The nsswitch mechanism, present on almost every unix these days, allows you to map {passwd, shadow, group, hosts, services, mail aliases, etc.} against {dns, local files, nis, etc} transparently as you see fit. If your system doesn't support host or password lookups against an LDAP database (as glibc-2.1 now does), there's a good chance you can build a module...
OK, having a central, common, consistent facility for everything sounds "nice", right? This flies in the face of the unix-credo: "Every tool should do one thing well". When confronted with a scredriver and pliers, do you complain: "You mean this one works by turning and that one works by squeezing?" No. This, to me, is akin to complaining about having multiple formats for '/etc/passwd' and dns zone files.
When I read about doing name-service (esp. passwd) stuff from files in single user mode and via some external service during multiuser mode, I almost choked. Local files aren't consulted when you're connected to a remote netinfo server? (Unix answers the question with the '/etc/nsswitch.conf' entry hosts: files nis or similar.) This essentially means that some external machine can tell you who root, wheel, localhost and shutdown are. I don't know if this is a horrible oversight, a design flaw, or some kludge to avoid implementing a real nsswitch. This is not a feature, its a bug. It begs questions about what other kludges will be used to patch it up.
It sounds to me like Apple has re-invented the wheel, and in fine tradtion, decided to make it different for the sake of being different.
I'll stick with my round wheels, thank you.
void rbowles(int signature)
{
signal(signature, rbowles);
raise(signature);
/* MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY
MADMEN ONLY */
Not to be too sharply critical of your criticism, but the article says "It's interesting to note that, as befits the NeXT heritage of NetInfo, many of the NetInfo-related man pages are dated 1989." And the article contains a link to Apple's tech note on NetInfo.
Please, do read the student's writing completely before criticizing him for not doing his homework. :)
Um.. maybe it's so that the user can enable the functionality if they want it, without having to recompile the kernel? It seems very reasonable to me that MacOS X's target market will be people who might want things like firewalls, but also might not want to get too dirty. Enabling stuff in the kernel and then shipping it with config files that don't use those features by default, seems like the Right Thing to do if you want easy configurability.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Apple have said that the necessity of rebooting after changing network settings is a bug, which will be fixed in the final release. The previously posted shell script shows that it's easy to fix, so we can be pretty certain it will be done.
The current MacOS, unlike Windows 9x, does not require a restart after changing your IP address, for example. If this suddenly became the case in Apple's new, improved MacOS, it would be a little embarrassing, to say the least.