Local MCX and Lion

If you’ve implemented Local MCX on your Leopard and/or Snow Leopard machines, you’ll be wondering if it works on Lion, too.

Some earlier posts on Local MCX:

The answer is yes – Local MCX works in Lion. There is one minor issue, though: if you are putting your local MCX version in an alternate local directory node (like /Local/MCX), you’ll need to know that Lion is a bit pickier about the contents of the directories of alternate local nodes.

If opendirectoryd on Lion doesn’t like your MCX node, it might look something like this:

> dscl /Local/MCX list / Data source (/Local/MCX) is not valid.

It turns out this is pretty easy to remedy: Lion’s opendirectoryd requires that a local directory node have at the minimum a “users” and a “groups” subdirectory. So if either of these subdirectories are missing, simply create them and restart opendirectoryd (killall opendirectoryd). dscl should now recognize the node:

> mkdir -p /private/db/dslocal/nodes/MCX/users > mkdir -p /private/db/dslocal/nodes/MCX/groups > killall opendirectoryd > dscl /Local/MCX list / AFPUserAliases Aliases Automount AutomountMap ComputerGroups ComputerLists Computers Config Ethernets Groups Hosts Mounts NetGroups Networks People PresetComputerGroups PresetComputerLists PresetComputers PresetGroups PresetUsers Protocols RPC Services SharePoints Users

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This entry was posted on August 4, 2011 at 2:09 pm and is filed under General. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.

5 Comments on “Local MCX and Lion”

Harald Monihart (@haraldmonihart) Says:

August 20, 2011 at 9:26 am
Shouldn’t it be
mkdir -p /var/db/dslocal/nodes/MCX/users
mkdir -p /var/db/dslocal/nodes/MCX/groups

instead of /private/db/…

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GregN Says:

August 20, 2011 at 9:43 am
Crap.

We’re both wrong. It should be

/private/var/db

Though just /var/db will work.

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Matt Willmore Says:

November 15, 2011 at 6:20 am
I also discovered that I needed to modify my custom search list as /BSD/local isn’t included (at least from what I can see) in 10.7. I updated it thusly:

sudo dscl /Search -create / SearchPolicy CSPSearchPath
sudo dscl /Search -create / CSPSearchPath /Local/Default /Local/MCX

Without updating it, dscl threw an -14008 (eDSNodeNotFound) error and MCX settings would not apply as /Local/MCX was never added to the search path.

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- GregN Says:
  
  November 15, 2011 at 8:21 am
  I had to do something similar for Lion as well. Thanks for mentioning it!
  
  Reply
Managing preference domains with MCX vs. Profiles - Admins Goodies Says:

December 19, 2011 at 10:30 am
[...] preferences will perform just the same with this new/additional delivery method. I have used localMCX in Lion for Office2011 prefs without issue, and tested other Apple manually applying profiles with [...]

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Managing OS X