What I Did On My Summer Vacation...

Well, not really Summer. Or a vacation. A weekend, really. In the Fall, no less.

I bought a book. I did more than that, but the book is what I want to talk about, so there.

I picked up Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks. So far, it's a damn fine book. It expects you to know a lot about administering systems walking in, but since I've been doing this and getting paid for it for around a dozen years now, that's not a big deal, I can handle that. Of all the books I've looked at, it's the only one that mentions Directory Access as more than a footnote. It's still lacking, but at least it's a good start, and it should provide enough clues so that I can really make this machine totally integrate with AD and NIS. Of course, it may just mean that I get to wipe the drive and reinstall a few more times while I continue to break things at random in an undocumented authentication subsystem, but what the hell, that's why I have the machine.

There's another book or two that I want to compliment this one. One covers things like how to customize the UI in ways Apple never meant for you to do (you know, like getting the $DEITY be damed dock out of the way by putting it up top). All kinds of nifty ways to short circuit the nice folk at Apple with nothing more than root access and vi.

The book I really want isn't out yet, and I don't know if it's even being written, but I can't imagine it isn't. That would be the Tiger update to Essential Mac OS X Panther Server Administration: Integrating Mac OS X Server into Heterogeneous Networks. I can only hope it goes even deeper into Directory Access. The Directory Access bits have been around since 10.2 as far as I can tell, so I'm not sure why the docs on it are so sparse. I can't imagine I'm the only person in the world trying to make the Mac authenticate either off of an NIS or AD domain (of course, being insane, I want the option of doing both simutaneously).

Am I Siegfried or Roy? Will the Tiger maul me, or is it My Bitch? We'll see.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation...

Well, not really Summer. Or a vacation. A weekend, really. In the Fall, no less.

I bought a book. I did more than that, but the book is what I want to talk about, so there.

I picked up Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks. So far, it's a damn fine book. It expects you to know a lot about administering systems walking in, but since I've been doing this and getting paid for it for around a dozen years now, that's not a big deal, I can handle that. Of all the books I've looked at, it's the only one that mentions Directory Access as more than a footnote. It's still lacking, but at least it's a good start, and it should provide enough clues so that I can really make this machine totally integrate with AD and NIS. Of course, it may just mean that I get to wipe the drive and reinstall a few more times while I continue to break things at random in an undocumented authentication subsystem, but what the hell, that's why I have the machine.

There's another book or two that I want to compliment this one. One covers things like how to customize the UI in ways Apple never meant for you to do (you know, like getting the $DEITY be damed dock out of the way by putting it up top). All kinds of nifty ways to short circuit the nice folk at Apple with nothing more than root access and vi.

The book I really want isn't out yet, and I don't know if it's even being written, but I can't imagine it isn't. That would be the Tiger update to Essential Mac OS X Panther Server Administration: Integrating Mac OS X Server into Heterogeneous Networks. I can only hope it goes even deeper into Directory Access. The Directory Access bits have been around since 10.2 as far as I can tell, so I'm not sure why the docs on it are so sparse. I can't imagine I'm the only person in the world trying to make the Mac authenticate either off of an NIS or AD domain (of course, being insane, I want the option of doing both simutaneously).

Am I Siegfried or Roy? Will the Tiger maul me, or is it My Bitch? We'll see.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation...

Well, not really Summer. Or a vacation. A weekend, really. In the Fall, no less.

I bought a book. I did more than that, but the book is what I want to talk about, so there.

I picked up Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks. So far, it's a damn fine book. It expects you to know a lot about administering systems walking in, but since I've been doing this and getting paid for it for around a dozen years now, that's not a big deal, I can handle that. Of all the books I've looked at, it's the only one that mentions Directory Access as more than a footnote. It's still lacking, but at least it's a good start, and it should provide enough clues so that I can really make this machine totally integrate with AD and NIS. Of course, it may just mean that I get to wipe the drive and reinstall a few more times while I continue to break things at random in an undocumented authentication subsystem, but what the hell, that's why I have the machine.

There's another book or two that I want to compliment this one. One covers things like how to customize the UI in ways Apple never meant for you to do (you know, like getting the $DEITY be damed dock out of the way by putting it up top). All kinds of nifty ways to short circuit the nice folk at Apple with nothing more than root access and vi.

The book I really want isn't out yet, and I don't know if it's even being written, but I can't imagine it isn't. That would be the Tiger update to Essential Mac OS X Panther Server Administration: Integrating Mac OS X Server into Heterogeneous Networks. I can only hope it goes even deeper into Directory Access. The Directory Access bits have been around since 10.2 as far as I can tell, so I'm not sure why the docs on it are so sparse. I can't imagine I'm the only person in the world trying to make the Mac authenticate either off of an NIS or AD domain (of course, being insane, I want the option of doing both simutaneously).

Am I Siegfried or Roy? Will the Tiger maul me, or is it My Bitch? We'll see.