On NeXT System Administration's Part in the Future of Rhapsody
via MacOS Rumors
>A reader with background in OpenStep sends us the following summary of
the power of Rhapsody's networking features, most notably the excellent
NetInfo:
This is the current state of OpenStep administration... Apple has
promised us that it will only get better:<
>>At our site, I can log into any of the OpenStep/Mach machines in our office
and be presented with all of my files, my email, my look and feel, my
configuration, etc... Any machine; doesn't matter if it is a sparc station, one
of the myriad of different Intel boxes, or the classic black NeXT hardware.
Better yet, when we want to add new hardware, we build the base
operating system on the machine (using the floppies/CD-ROM) and
simply plug it into the net and reboot. As the machine boots, the network
recognizes an unknown computer and asks us to identify the new machine.
Once identified (with password authorization, of course), the machine
boots with its new identity and is ready to be used.
That's it. All accounts work, all printers are shared, the machine can be
used as a rendering engine, faxing works, all filesystems are available,
email works, it can browser the internet at large and is otherwise a
perfectly happy member of our network community. Takes no time at all.
All this is achieved through the use of NetInfo-- a network
administration database that features multiple levels, redundancy,
automatic back-ups, and many many other features. NetInfo is very cool....
so cool, as a matter of fact, that Sun uses NetInfo to administer their
international company internet because their own solution -- NIS+ --
doesn't scale well.<<
>This bodes quite well for Apple, as it now has a technology that allows a
sort of "plug-and-play" networking, as well as an OS that blends some of
the handiest features of the much-talked-about Network Computers (NCs),
but is still a true Personal Computer.<
macosrumors.com |
