Specifications

Chapter 1 Directory Services with Open Directory 23
 Managed network views: The administrator can set up custom views that users see
when they select the Network icon in the sidebar of a Finder window. Because these
managed network views are stored in a directory domain, they’re available when a
user logs in.
Access to Directory Services
Open Directory can access directory domains for the following kinds of directory
services:
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), an open standard common in Â
mixed environments of Macintosh, UNIX, and Windows systems. LDAP is the native
directory service for shared directories in Mac OS X Server.
Local directory domain, the local directory service for every Mac OS X and Mac OS X Â
Server v10.6 or later.
Active Directory, the directory service of Microsoft Windows 2000 and 2003 servers. Â
Network Information System (NIS), the directory service of many UNIX servers. Â
BSD at les, the legacy directory service of UNIX systems. Â
Inside a Directory Domain
Information in a directory domain is organized by record type. Record types are specic
categories of information such as users, groups, and computers. For each record type,
a directory domain can contain any number of records. Each record is a collection of
attributes, and each attribute has values.
If you think of each record type as a spreadsheet that contains a category of
information, records are like the rows of the spreadsheet, attributes are like
spreadsheet columns, and each spreadsheet cell contains values.
For example, when you dene a user account by using Workgroup Manager, you are
creating a user record (a record of the “user” record type). The settings you congure
for the user account—short name, full name, home folder location, and so on—
become values of attributes in the user record. The user record and the values of its
attributes reside in a directory domain.
In some directory services, such as LDAP and Active Directory, directory information
is organized by object class. Like record types, object classes dene categories of
information. An object class denes similar information, named entries, by specifying
attributes that an entry must or may contain.