The last couple of days I tried to set up an old G4 with OS X 10.4 Tiger to work as a webserver. I didn’t want to run the apache / php that ships with Tiger because these versions are far behind the current versions. So I installed everything via macports which worked pretty smooth. It is common practice to let apache run as www:www (user:group) and I wanted to stick with that. So I wondered how I could add me to the group www since OS X ignores the /etc/group file. The obvious solution was of course NetInfo Manager (in the Utilities folder) but since OS X 10.5 wont ship with NetInfo Manager I figured that there has to be a different way. There are two command line tools that can get the job done. The first is dscl which gives you full access to everything NetInfo Manager would do for you. The second tool however is especially for adding and removing users to / from groups.

dseditgroup -o edit -a hukl www

for adding me to the www group and

dseditgroup -o edit -d hukl www

will remove me from that group.

Works like a charm but I’m still wondering if there will be a Workgroup Manager for the regular OS X or some other replacement of NetInfo Manager

I know I’m posting too much technical stuff recently …

Main entry continued