NetInfo
| Company type | Software component |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software |
| Predecessor | Unix system configuration files, Sun Microsystems' Network Information Service (Yellow Pages) |
| Founded | 1988 |
| Defunct | 2007 |
| Fate | Discontinued and replaced by dslocal in Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) |
Area served | NeXTSTEP and early Mac OS X operating systems |
| Products | Distributed network configuration database |
NetInfo functioned as a distributed network configuration database incorporated in NeXTSTEP and the initial releases of Mac OS X up to version 10.4. It maintained network-wide configuration details, encompassing users and groups, within a binary directory-based database that could optionally derive information from a domain server. NetInfo supplanted numerous conventional Unix system configuration files, which persisted solely for single-user mode; the majority of Unix APIs interfaced directly with NetInfo instead.
History
NetInfo was first introduced in NeXTSTEP 0.9, where it took over from Unix system files and Sun Microsystems' Network Information Service (Yellow Pages) on NeXT hardware. Its adoption sparked debate due to its exclusivity to NeXT platforms and because routing DNS queries through NetInfo sometimes resulted in latency—such as delays when converting a UNIX UID to a username stalled on DNS lookups. Initially, users could disable NetInfo in favor of traditional Unix files; however, starting with NeXTSTEP 2, disabling NetInfo also disabled DNS support, frequently causing user lockouts when DNS servers failed to respond.
Although many challenges were resolved in the Mac OS X iteration, by that time other solutions like LDAP had become widely adopted. Apple discontinued NetInfo following Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), substituting it in Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) with dslocal, a local search node built on standard property list files stored at /var/db/dslocal/.
Files
The NetInfo database was located at and was accessible exclusively by the root account. Management was possible through its API, the NetInfo Manager application, or command-line utilities such as .
Upon NetInfo’s removal in Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), its associated tools were retired and replaced with new management interfaces.
Data
NetInfo organized directories containing essential data categories including:
- afpuser_aliases
- aliases
- exports (NFS shares)
- groups
- machines
- mounts
- networks
- printers
- protocols
- RPCs
- services
- users