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Getting OS X to look at local /etc/hosts Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 18 October 2002 Posting this here as I didn't find it easy to sleuth out this information and others who have just moved to Mac OS X may be wondering too.Scenario - I don't run a local name service because I can't rely on any one or two machines always being on my network - we're a training company, various subnets go out on site, etc - so I have /etc/host files on every machine and an automated scheme to update them when a system happend to be in-house. I want my OS X system to refer to its local /etc/hosts file, but instead it's using lookupd, which doesn't use /etc/resolv.conf like other *nix operating systems .... Solution: Set up lookupd as follows: niutil -create . /locations/lookupd/hosts niutil -createprop . /locations/lookupd/hosts LookupOrder CacheAgent FFAgent NIAgent DNSAgent DSAgent and (shock, horror) I then rebooted. /etc/hosts now used because of the FFAgent (Flat File Agent) addition to the default. Here's part of my /etc/hosts file, in case you need a reminder ... Code:
Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 18 October 2002 Addendum to previous post ...The Flat File Agent is specified as F-F-A-g-e-n-t (without the hyphens). I've entered the text directly in on the board, but some of the smart rendering tags are going funny things to it - it should NOt read Ff*gent ! Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 24 November 2002 A "gem" from chatting with a geek at the MacExpo in London yesterday - I'm told tha the graphic tools for administering the network information services are designed for (and work for) remote administration only. In other words, if you've only got the one Mac on your network running OSX then you'll have to do the admin from the command prompt.Posted by Custard (Custard), 11 October 2003 Ok, slightly off topic, and may change when I get Panther in a couple of weeks, but..Have you ever got NFS mounts to work in OS X. I have tried for hours at a time. I know the Solaris server is serving because I can mount from a Linux machine. (in fact I installed Linux by NFS from the sun) Any ideas? Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 12 October 2003 I had a quick go "out the box", but it wasn't plug an play. On my list of things to do whan I have some spare time (a.k.a. in the distant future at the moment!). I'm suspecting I need to look into lookupd a lot further and there may be an answer in there with regards to configuration ... for I seeCode:
which tells me it's up and running, just not configured! Posted by John_Moylan (jfp), 19 October 2003 Accessing NFS is in Mac OSX Hack's from O'Reillyhttp://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/341 Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 19 October 2003 Thanks ... bought it last week, haven't had a chance to read it yet Posted by Custard (Custard), 20 October 2003 Cheers, I will probably get the next edition after Panther.I have my order for Panther in already, and am hoping it lives up to it's promises of connectivity. It's supposed to have much more support for networking (XWindows, Netbios etc.). I had numerous looks on the net about getting NFS to work, all seemed over complicated relative to my Solaris or Linux machines. Hopefully I will be able to finally get all my machines talking. I'll post again when I get Panther.... B Posted by Custard (Custard), 2 November 2003 Hi,I have installed Panther now, and NFS is working fine. Maybe there was something odd about my 10.1 install. hey ho. FTPconnections from connect servers works nicely too. Also the X11 support is great. I can run gimp on my Sparc, and use it on the mac now, which is fantastic. And it's nice to see those spring-loaded folders back that I missed so horribly from mac os 9 Bruce Posted by John_Moylan (jfp), 3 November 2003 On a related note Custard, how did your Panther install go? smoothly?I hear there's a lot of graphical goodies in 10.3, friends of mine are raving about expose and the user switching (something I'm looking forward to as I share my powerbook with my wife) Posted by Custard (Custard), 3 November 2003 Hiya,The install was pretty smooth. I did have a glitch where the hard disk started hunting, and the install failed, but the second attempt was fine. I guess my HD is on the way out... I haven't tried expose or user switching yet. I'll let you know when I get round to it. I've only got 1 user at the moment. I like the icon thumbnail image preview thingy, which makes handling large directories of images easier. Safari is nice, although some (nasty) web sites won't let me in, because it announces itself as other than IE. I haven't looked to see if you can change this like you can in opera. There's a few things I don't like (call me picky) :- The ftp url in the Finder's go menu only connects to an ftp server as read-only. To write it suggests safari or anothe application. I feel fleeced about that, and I don't understand why they did it. The sidebar, I find annoying, but it's easily turned off. I also don't like being railroaded into signing up for the .mac account on installation, although again you can ignore these. I'm also uneasy about the first account on the system being the 'administrator'. Shouldn't the administrator always be root. And you don't seem to be able to log in as root. Maybe it's because I'm a unix person, but it feels a bit 'windowsy' to default to having a user account which can do anything to the system. Of course these are only niggles. Apart from that, I haven't seen anything overly exciting yet. There are a lot of fixes and speedups, and some of the older utilities have been improved. I will of course let you know when I do. After all, it has only been on my G4 for 2 days Bruce Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 18 April 2005 The following reproduced (with permission) from an email exchange ...Quote:
The geek is misinformed. Here's how I add users, NFS-mounts, groups, etc.: - edit the appropriate flat-file - use 'niload' to update the NetInfo DB. - If I have changed an /etc/passwd entry, I have to use the GUI to repair the shadow hash I use the GUI NetInfo Mgr only when I have to, because it's so #$%^#$% clumsy. But when I use it, it works fine. I do like to keep my things in the NIDB, rather than the flat files in /etc, however--it's only the GUI I don't like. I am on 10.3.8 (but I've been doing it this way since 10.0) (Signed) Another geek This page is a thread posted to the opentalk forum
at www.opentalk.org.uk and
archived here for reference. To jump to the archive index please
follow this link.
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