Mac Geekery

NetInfo is dead. It’s gone. It’s a part of the past. It’s like that ghost of a bad dream you have in the morning where you can’t quite remember why you’re shaken, but you just remember that you were and that it was horrible.

Leopard ate NetInfo.

In its place is a new native Directory Services store based on folders and XML property list files. Yep, a replacement for flat files that uses … flat files. Kind of.

This isn’t news, per-se. It’s been public for a while, just not in the forefront of people’s minds. Back in 2006, Jordan K. Hubbard, the Director of UNIX Technology at Apple Computer, made it a very clear statement on a message to the darwinos-users list. It was kind of shrugged off, I think. Then in the middle of all the reviews of Leopard at sites like AppleInsider, they noted the complete lack of the NetInfo Manager program on the drive. Then, too, it kind of went to the way side. Here we are today and none of nicl or nidump or niload are even on the system. It’s gone, and without a bit of fan-fare.

So, what replaced it? As best as I can tell the public name is simply “Local Directory Services” (or dslocal) and it’s powered by the DirectoryService daemon. The data store is in /var/db/dslocal/nodes/ with the local node being called simply Default inside that directory. The structure is kind of interesting, though…

/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default # ls -1
afpuser_aliases
aliases
config
groups
machines
networks
users

It looks exactly like a native Directory Services node (like NetInfo or LDAP, etc.). No more half-dozen binary files or obscure database. Inside you’ll find something happy:

bash-3.2# ls -l config/
total 16
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  1215 Oct 26 10:16 KerberosKDC.plist
drwx------  3 root  wheel   102 Oct 26 10:16 SharePoints
-rw-------  1 root  wheel   255 Nov  5 15:27 SharePoints.plist
bash-3.2# ls -l config/SharePoints
total 8
-rw-------  1 root  wheel  1134 Oct 26 10:16 Adam Knight's Public Folder.plist
bash-3.2# cat config/SharePoints/Adam\ Knight\'s\ Public\ Folder.plist 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>afp_guestaccess</key>
	<array>
		<string>1</string>
	</array>
	<key>afp_name</key>
	<array>
		<string>Adam Knight's Public Folder</string>
	</array>
	<key>afp_shared</key>
	<array>
		<string>1</string>
	</array>
	<key>directory_path</key>
	<array>
		<string>/Users/ahknight/Public</string>
	</array>
...

Plain ole’ property lists. XML, even, not those frustrating binary plist files.

Which of course, makes one wonder if there’s some hidden index to make life frustrating for the hackers among us that want to monkey around with it. So, a test.

Messing with LDS

First, I went into config/SharePoints and looked at what was there.

-rw-------  1 root  wheel  1134 Oct 26 10:16 Adam Knight's Public Folder.plist

Hmm. That’s an easy tweak. I copied the file and created:

-rw-------  1 root  wheel  1139 Nov  7 13:53 Adam Knight's Desktop Folder.plist

I then went into the new file and changed all the references to Public to Desktop and saved. Then I restarted AFP:

# launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.AppleFileServer.plist
# launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.AppleFileServer.plist

Then I went to the Mac right next to me and … voila.

So, friends, flat-file hacking of the local directory services at last. Have fun, and make backups!