The Machines Directory
As noted earlier in Section 12.5,
the /machines
directories within a NetInfo
hierarchy play a special role in defining it. They describe the
domains that make up a NetInfo hierarchy by mapping machines to the
domains that they host.
Figure 12-6. A local domain’s /machines directory
A /machines
directory contains one subdirectory
for every machine (a single computer somewhere on the visible
network) that it defines. Figure 12-6 shows an
example as seen in NetInfo Manager, with the
localhost subdirectory selected. (Every
Mac’s local NetInfo database should contain
/machines/localhost
, as it defines the local
machine’s role in hosting its own NetInfo domain.)
Along with the name and address properties that make each such
subdirectory work similarly to a line in the old Unix
/etc/hosts
config file, each of these
machine-specific directories contains a serves
property, whose value indicates the NetInfo domain hosted on this
machine. In Figure 12-6, we can see that the machine
called localhost
serves the domain tagged
local.
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